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Stancliffe estate can perhaps help Wycherley for now, but some day, in different circumstances, you might be able to help
us!’
    She could barely restrain an incredulous laugh. Stancliffe was a vast and rich ancestral home; its estate always ran at a profit, and it had a water-powered corn mill that minted money, David Parker said. Wycherley was paltry in comparison.
    He touched her hand. A gesture of friendship, no more, but his long, lean fingers burned her; she felt that silken touch through every nerve ending.
    ‘Are you in a hurry
now?’
he asked her suddenly.
    ‘No, not at all,’ she lied. Really, there was a great deal to be done: the household accounts to be sorted, Cook’s monthly order for the stores to be cut back as much as possible, Turley’s laments about the leak in the roof of the north wing to be placated….
    ‘Then let’s ride together,’ said Lucas, Viscount Conistone,‘now, around Wycherley’s farms. I know the harvest has been a bad one, but there’s time yet to remedy things’.
    Her eyes were wide with wonder and surprise. ‘But—you’re home
on leave
. You must have so many things you’d rather be doing, my lord!’
    ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said rather quietly, ‘I haven’t’.
    Her heart leapt; her soul sang. Quietly, wonderingly, she packed her things into her saddle bag. And as he helped her on to her pony, her thoughts were in utter turmoil. For she’d fallen head over heels in love, and her world was suddenly a different, a marvellous place.
    * * *
    And so, during those weeks of late August and September when the sun shone as if in apology for the dreadful early summer, Lord Lucas Conistone called for her almost daily and they would ride around the Wycherley and Stancliffe estates together, with either Turley or one of her sisters accompanying them as chaperon, talking about crops and harvesting.
    Verena’s complexion became golden in the sun and her mother chided her to wear a wide-brimmed sunbonnet. But Lucas laughed at her headgear and told her that he disliked ladies with pallor; he told her also that her eyes were like amber in the sunlight. ‘You must have inherited your grandmother’s colouring,’ he said.
    She didn’t even realise that he knew about her father’s Portuguese mother. ‘Her name was Lucia. And yes, I am told that I look like her,’ she said shyly.
    ‘Then she must have been beautiful’.
    She was not used to being complimented on her looks. Her mother had always bemoaned the fact that she was not blonde and blue-eyed, like Deb and Izzy. Her heart thudded. ‘You are making fun of me. I’m sure I would never gain approval at Almack’s!’
    ‘No, because the others there would die of jealousy,’ he answered lightly. And he added, even more softly,
‘Minha querida’.
    The Portuguese endearment—
my dear one
—went through her like an arrow. A light aside. A frivolous compliment, nothing more, she told herself swiftly.
    She also had to damp down her mother’s excited speculation. ‘Lord Conistone has no intentions towards me whatsoever, Mama, I assure you! We are friends, nothing more’.
    But it seemed truly marvellous to be Lucas’s friend as they rode together that September, talking about the agricultural improvements that were needed to feed a country at war. Though Lucas never talked about the war itself.
    Of course, she always knew that soon he would have to go back. She knew that the harvest festival, in the fourth week of September, would be his last night at home; he was due to rejoin his regiment the next day, he had told her. But it was easy to believe, that warm, moonlit night, that the cruel war was a whole world away.
    His friend Captain Alec Stewart, whose reputation as a high liver was just starting to gather pace, was there, too, and of course there was great excitement amongst the local girls when Alec and Lucas stayed on after the supper for the dancing. Yet Lucas danced with Verena nearly all evening. When she