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looked down at Jane’s bowed head, the color of old whiskey in the candlelight, and felt something like pity twist in her gut, pity and a bit of envy. Her family had never given her cause to love them as Jane loved hers. They had abandoned her when she had most needed them and ground salt in her wounds when she was most vulnerable.
    All for the best, of course. It had toughened her up, made her what she was. But there was no need for Jane to be toughened so. The girl had enough on her head already.
    No need to repine, Gwen promised herself. It needn’t take more than a week or so. They would find Agnes, give her a good ticking off, and come right back to their life in France.
    “Get your things together,” Gwen said regally. “We’re going to England.”

C hapter 2
    The building sat on a low rise, shaded by a stand of trees. In spring, it might have been a happy place, but not now. A bolt of lightning forked through the sky as Sir Magnifico clattered into the courtyard, his senses rent with misgiving. Where were the joyful carols of the cloistered ladies? The voices of the virgins were hushed and anxious, as muted as the rain that dripped down the cold, gray stone.
    Was it an ancient curse that lay over the building? Or some more recent evil?
    â€”From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady
    E ngland wasn’t at all what Colonel William Reid had expected it to be.
    Back in the mess in Madras, his fellow officers were always nattering on about the lush green of the fields, the cerulean blue of the sky, the delicate touch of a spring breeze, as soft and sweet as a lover’s kiss. They hadn’t mentioned the driving rain that got beneath a man’s collar, or the mud of the roads that sucked at cart wheels and caked the bottom of a man’s boots. If the wind was the touch of a lover, this was less a kiss and more a hearty slap across the face.
    Shivering in his newly purchased, many-caped coat, William felt like a piece of wet washing, damp down to the skin, and then some besides. Winter, yes. He’d expected winter to be cold. But this was spring, for the love of all that was holy. Birds should be on the wing and buds on the thorn, or wherever it was that buds went.
    So much for April in England, of which the poets sang so sweetly and so falsely. William would have traded it in a moment for May in Madras. Faith, he’d even take July in Jaipur, sweating in his regimentals in the blazing sun, hotter than hell and ready to wilt.
    Not that he had that choice. It was England for him now, will he nill he, a classic case of blithely making one’s bed, only to discover, when the time came to lie on it, that it was full of lumps. He was good at that.
    And didn’t I warn you?
He could hear his mother’s outraged Highland brogue in his head, exaggerated by time and distance.
    His mother would be turning in her tartan grave if she knew that he’d chosen to take up residence in England in his old age. They’d been committed adherents to the King over the Water, his parents; fled from Inverness in ’45 in the wake of the disaster at Culloden. Committed from a distance, that was. In the safety of the Carolinas, their commitment had extended mostly to derisory epithets about the English and toasting the Pretender’s health, such as it was. They’d had some lovely glasses made up, crystal, with thistles, and some Jacobite motto or other scrolled about the bowl. Latin, it was, but what the words had been, he couldn’t say.
    Memory blurred. Or perhaps it was the drizzle driving into his eyes, that maddening, peculiarly English form of precipitation, not quite mist, not quite rain, but something in between, all but impossible to keep off. Give him a proper thunderstorm any day, like the sort they’d had in his youth in the Carolinas, winds howling, thunder crashing, not like this, insidious, invidious, and damnably damp.
    For choice, he would have