The Black Sheep's Return. Elizabeth Beacon

like a helpless babe lost in the wood as a lesser person might. A true Buckle did not crumble under misfortune, but it was difficult to stay regally resolute when her noble family didn’t care what happened to her and she frowned into the gathering darkness of the June night.

      If only she had been able to marry the Duke of Dettingham, she would have a vital, handsome husband to make getting children tolerable and all would have been well with her world, but he had contrived to avoid the honour. Aristocratic marriages were seldom based on love, but it seemed the noble Seaborne family thought otherwise. Freya sighed at the contrariness of gentlemen while she walked with less and less confidence into the unknown. The Duke pretended to be a rational man looking for a well-connected wife who was pretty enough to make filling his nurseries bearable, but he turned out to be a romantic fool who fell head over ears in love with an antidote and married her instead.

      So the Duke married his unsuitable Duchess and a year later her own mother, the widowed Countess of Bowland, was dead and Freya had been learning hard lessons about the world ever since. Nobody could accuse the rigidly proper Countess of being unfaithful to her lord, but the family made it clear Freya was an outsider. Mingling their blue blood with that of an East India nabob’s daughter might have been a deplorable necessity, since a Buckle could not take to trade and actually earn money, but it didn’t make the result a true aristocrat.

      When she had a chance of another suitor pleasing enough to endure marriage with she went along with her half-brother’s plans, until she heard Lord George Perton tell his friends how he was about to suffer. She shuddered at the memory of hearing him describe her as a stubborn nag he would never ride given a free choice of mounts, but he’d take a gallop on her for her fat dowry. His friends laughed uproariously, then commended his courage.

      ‘Dare say the bad-tempered filly will throw you into a duck pond, Per old man. I’d jib in your shoes, fortune or no.’

      ‘Ah, but you ain’t as poor as me and the old man swears he’ll throw me out to starve if I don’t wed a golden dolly. I’ll marry her and tup her to get a brat or two, then my father can live with her while I take a ride with the fine fillies I can buy with her money. They might argue each other into an early grave, with any luck.’

      So Freya had refused him and her halfbrother’s fury had been memorable, but it wasn’t as if she had grown up with the illusion that her wider family looked on her advent with unalloyed delight. She accepted she was unlovable, but lately being accepted by society as Lady Freya Buckle, daughter of an Earl of ancient bloodlines and old renown, hadn’t been enough to make her bend to her family’s wishes any longer. Now Bowland was favouring a political crony with even less charm than Lord George and Freya decided it was time to make a new life, before she was bullied into marrying a man she loathed. The thought of sharing a bed with Mr Forland made her shudder at the thought of his flabby body, greedy hands, mean little eyes and all the unthinkable intimacies she had no wish to learn with him.

      A trip to her maternal great-aunt had seemed a good place to start an independent life. They corresponded dutifully and she’d been invited to Miss Bradstock’s house, but Bowland would not hear of her accepting. As a first, wary step into the unknown her decision to go anyway had seemed safe enough, but now look where it had landed her. The shudder that shook her this time was so powerful it nearly left her in a shaking and hysterical heap on the forest floor. No, she was a Buckle, even if her old life was over, Freya reminded herself starkly, and Buckles didn’t buckle.

      She swished the skirts of her gown away from an encroaching bramble with some of her old panache, glared at it as if it was her worst enemy and finally let herself consider the idea she could have been going round in circles in the watchful silence of these woodlands for hours. If only she had done as Mama always insisted and travelled with armed outriders, who would have put off rag-tag scoundrels like the ones who had held up her hired carriage and threatened them with rape and murder. Freya clamped her hand over her mouth as she shook her head at the whimper on her lips and tried to hold back the terror threatening to turn her hysterical. She gulped in a huge gasp of cool, fresh air and reminded herself hysterics didn’t get a woman anywhere, unless she was the current Countess of Bowland, of course.

      An audible snort of exasperation made her wonder if her mouth had an independent life this time, but her brother Bowland really was an idiot—unfortunately one with a dream of power and not enough sense to see he was being manipulated by his wife, who was a clever rogue. If Freya had known how dangerous it was to steal away and travel lesser-known roads, she would probably have risked the fat politician after all. No, she felt sick at the very idea and would rather be torn apart by wild beasts than wed Mr Forland, then she remembered how close she’d come to just that today and her empty stomach dry-retched painfully. Again she heard the betraying sob in her breath as dawning terror, then desperate flight, replayed in her mind and she trembled so badly she had to bully herself not to simply give up.

      Heaven send the coachman and guard had not been murdered by the brutes who’d attacked them, Freya prayed and shuddered again at their possible fate. She desperately hoped handing over the hefty purse she was carrying had allowed them to escape, but tales of unscrupulous men who banded together to prey on the unwary, such as Lady Freya Buckle, kept nudging at her as she wondered if she was a bigger fool than Bowland to believe paying the hired coachman extra to help her run away from home was as good an idea as it had seemed at the time.

      She was alive and unmolested, thanks to her headlong flight, but the thorny underbrush was intent on destroying the very clothes she stood up in and robbing her of her last shreds of dignity. If only she’d sewn a few guineas into her petticoat, or stuffed one of Bowland’s new-fangled paper bank notes into her short corset before she set out. She had been too intent on escaping to worry about what might happen along the way. One mistake she would never make again, if she ever managed to reclaim her true position in life.

      She stopped to listen for any sound over the racing beat of her own heart. Breathing as deeply as she could, she sensed she was alone out here and suddenly she really didn’t want to be. If only she had been born in a different bed. A comfortable squirely one, perhaps, where she could have grown up as merely a passably pretty young miss. Then she might have made friends, gone on impromptu picnics and danced the night away at country balls with eager young gentlemen in search of a comfortable wife.

      Dreaming wouldn’t get her out of this endless forest and now it was getting dark. It took all her resolution to face the endless isolation and strange twilight noises without giving in to her fears. Lucky it was summer, she told herself, and this was England so no wolves or bears were running about the forest hungry for a well-fed young aristocrat. Of course there were still human wolves, as she had found out earlier today, but best not to think of them.

      Freya struggled to see further than a foot in front of her nose and came to the unwelcome conclusion that she would have to find a suitably dry tree and curl up under it for the night, before she fell flat on her face into some sharp and clinging bush that would snare her fast in the darkness, or cut her to ribbons when she tried to escape. Failing anything better, it might be as well to stop before she did more damage.

      Hesitating as she fought what felt like an ancient terror of being trapped in the forest by night, she snuffed the air like one of Bowland’s hunting dogs and caught an elusive flare of scent made up of wood-smoke and manure and perhaps even a garden that told her she wasn’t so far away from humanity after all. Unsure if that was good or bad, given the horrors of her day, she tried to creep closer as softly as she could. Shivering like a nervous racehorse as full darkness brought the threatening chill of night with it, she hesitated in mid-stride and tripped over a protruding root and fell awkwardly into a heap of felled logs waiting to be split by the forester she was trying not to disturb. She tried her best to get up as she flailed around to find a prop in the dark and grasped yet another bramble instead.

      With hot pain from her new scratches bringing tears to her eyes she made herself splay her hands palms down to push herself up and discovered she couldn’t endure any weight on her ankle as agony shot through it and she couldn’t hold back a grunt of pain. At last tears were streaming down her face unchecked at the misery of it all and she couldn’t seem to stop now she’d finally got started. Conscious of a huge and