Lord Ravensden's Marriage. Anne Herries

his personal income. Sometimes a plump rabbit or a pigeon found its way into the kitchen, and Beatrice suspected that Bellows was not above a little poaching, but she would never dream of asking where the gift came from. Indeed, she could not afford to!

      Walking upstairs to her bedchamber to wash and change her clothes, Beatrice reflected on the strangeness of fate.

      “My poor, dear sister,” she murmured. “Oh, how could that rogue Ravensden have been so cruel?”

      She herself had been deserted by a man who had previously declared himself madly in love with her, because, she understood, he had lost a small fortune at the gaming tables. She truly believed that Matthew Walters had intended to marry her, until he was ruined by a run of bad luck—he had certainly declared himself in love with her several times. Only her own caution had prevented her allowing her own feelings to show.

      If she had given way to impulse, she would have been jilted publicly, which would have made her situation very much worse. At least she had been spared the scandal and humiliation that would have accompanied such an event.

      Only Beatrice’s parents had known the truth. Mrs Roade had held her while she wept out her disappointment and hurt…but that was a long time ago. Beatrice had been much younger then, perhaps a little naïve, innocent of the ways of the world. She had grown up very quickly after Matthew’s desertion.

      Since then, she had given little thought to marriage. She suspected that most men were probably like the one who had tried so ardently to seduce her. If she had been foolish enough to give in to his pleading…what then? She might have been ruined as well as jilted. Somehow she had resisted, though she had believed herself in love…

      Beatrice laughed harshly. She was not such a fool as to believe in it now! She had learned to see the world for what it was, and knew that love was just something to be written of by dreamers and poets.

      She had been taught a hard lesson, and now she had her sister’s experience to remind her. If Olivia had been so hurt that she was driven to do something that she must know would ruin her in the eyes of the world…What a despicable man Lord Ravensden must be!

      “Oh, you wicked, wicked man,” she muttered as she finished dressing and prepared to go down for dinner. “I declare you deserve to be boiled in oil for what you have done!”

      Lord Ravensden had begun to equate with the Marquis of Sywell in her mind. After her uncomfortable escape from injury that evening, Beatrice was inclined to think all the tales of him were true! And Lord Ravensden not much better.

      A moment’s reflection must have told her this was hardly likely to be true, for her sister would surely not even have entertained the idea of marriage to such a man. She was the indulged adopted daughter of loving parents, and had she said from the start that she could not like their heir, would surely have been excused from marrying him. It was the shock and the scandal of her having jilted her fiancé that had upset them.

      However, Beatrice was not thinking like herself that evening. The double shock had made her somehow uneasy. She had the oddest notion that something terrible had either happened or was about to…something that might affect not only her and her sister’s lives, but that of many others in the four villages.

      The scream she had heard that night before the Marquis came rushing upon her…it had sounded evil. Barely human. Was it an omen of something?

      After hearing it, she had come home to receive her sister’s letter. Of course the scream could have nothing to do with that…and yet the feeling that the lives of many people were about to change was strong in her. A cold chill trickled down her spine as she wondered at herself. Never before had she experienced such a feeling…was it what people sometimes called a premonition?

      Do not be foolish, Beatrice, she scolded herself mentally. Whatever would Papa say to such an illogical supposition?

      Her dear papa would, she felt sure, give her a lecture upon the improbability of there being anything behind her feelings other than mere superstition, and of course he would be perfectly right.

      Shaking her head, her hair now neatly confined in a sleek chignon, she dismissed her fears. There had been something about the atmosphere at the Abbey that night, but perhaps all old buildings with a history of mystery and violence would give out similar vibes if one visited them alone and at dusk.

      If Beatrice had been superstitious, she would have said that her experience that evening was a warning—a sign from the ghosts of long dead monks—but she was not fanciful. She knew that what she had heard was most likely the cry of a wounded animal. Like the practical girl she was, she dismissed the idea of warnings and premonitions as nonsense, laughed at her own fancies and went downstairs to eat a hearty meal.

      “Ravensden, you are an almighty fool, and should be ashamed of yourself! Heaven only knows how you are to extricate yourself from this mess.”

      Gabriel Frederick Harold Ravensden, known as Harry to a very few, Ravensden to most, contemplated his image in his dressing-mirror and found himself disliking what he saw more than ever before. It was the morning of the thirty-first of October, and he was standing in the bedchamber of his house in Portland Place. What a damned ass he had been! He ought to be boiled in oil, then flayed until his bones showed through.

      He grinned at the thought, wondering if it should really be the other way round to inflict the maximum punishment, then the smile was wiped clean as he remembered it was his damnable love of the ridiculous that had got them all into this mess in the first place.

      “Did you say something, milord?” Beckett asked, coming into the room with a pile of starched neckcloths in anticipation of his lordship’s likely need. “Will you be wearing the new blue coat this morning?”

      “What? Oh, I’m not sure,” Harry said. “No, I think something simpler—more suitable for riding.”

      His man nodded, giving no sign that he thought the request surprising since his master had returned to town only the previous evening. He offered a fine green cloth, which was accepted by his master with an abstracted air. An unusual disinterest in a man famed for his taste and elegance in all matters of both dress and manners.

      “You may leave me,” Harry said, after he had been helped into his coat, having tied a simple knot in the first neckcloth from the pile. “I shall call you if I need you.”

      “Yes, milord.”

      Beckett inclined his head and retired to the dressing-room to sigh over the state of his lordship’s boots after his return from the country, and Harry returned to the thorny problem on his mind.

      He should in all conscience have told his distant cousin to go to hell the minute the marriage was suggested to him. Yet the beautiful Miss Olivia Roade Burton had amused him with her pouts and frowns. She had been the unrivalled success of the Season, and, having been thoroughly spoiled all her life, was inclined to be a little wayward.

      However, her manners were so charming, her face so lovely, that he had been determined to win her favours. He had found the chase diverting, and thought he might like to have her for his wife—and a wife he must certainly have before too many months had passed.

      “A damned, heavy-footed, crass idiot!” Harry muttered, remembering the letter he had so recently received from his fiancée. “This business is of your own making…”

      At four-and-thirty, he imagined he was still capable of giving his wife the son he so badly needed, but it would not do to leave it much later—unless he wanted the abominable Peregrine to inherit his own estate and that of Lord Burton. Both he and Lord Burton were agreed that such an outcome would not be acceptable to either of them—though at the moment they were agreeing on little else. Indeed, they had parted in acrimony. Had Harry not been a gentleman, he would probably have knocked the man down. He frowned as he recalled their conversation of the previous evening.

      “An infamous thing, sir,” Harry had accused. “To abandon a girl you have lavished with affection. I do not understand how you could turn her out. Surely you will reconsider?”

      “She