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battlefields of the Peninsula. But news came a few weeks later that he’d resigned from the army and was instead living the high life in London with the Prince’s set. After that came whispers, too, of secret
affaires
with beautiful society women—and each piece of news about Lord Lucas Conistone stabbed Verena to the heart.
    * * *
    Still during that winter of anguish, there’d been no word from their father. And hard on the heels of the rumours about Lucas had come an ominous visit from Mr Mayhew, their father’s attorney. Verena’s mother had felt a migraine coming on, so it was Verena who had to listen to Mr Mayhew’s grave explanation that the loan on which Wycherley depended was being withdrawn, due, Mr Mayhew feared, to personal pressure on their bank from the Earl of Stancliffe, Lucas’s grandfather.
    Verena had first thought,
This must be a mistake. The Earl is my godfather. Despite his disagreement with my father, he cannot intend to harm us so!
She wrote to the Earl that same day, explaining their predicament; and that was when she’d received the devastating answer:
    The Earl of Stancliffe does not respond to begging letters. Especially when they are sent by a fortune-hunting harlot—yes, my grandson Lucas told me of your pitiful attempts to entrap him.
    Verena had locked herself in her room on receiving that note, shaking with shock. She read it again and again, remembering every conversation, every look of Lucas’s, trying to make sense of it and failing.
    She’d told Lucas that when he returned to Wycherley, he’d find it transformed; it was unrecognisable indeed, within months of his departure, for, by the January of 1809, the Sheldons, and the Wycherley estate, were starting to face the road to ruin.
    Soon afterwards, the Earl made a ludicrously low offer for the entire estate, which Verena refused outright.
Something
would happen, she thought desperately. Her dear father would return, filling the house with his beloved presence, making everything all right….
    Her father had been abroad for months, and still nothing whatsoever had been heard of him, though Verena took the gig or rode every fortnight to the shipping office in Portsmouth ten miles away to ask if there was any news.
    And early in February 1809, during bitter winter weather, the news finally arrived. Sir Jack Sheldon would never be coming home again.

Chapter Four

    J ack Sheldon was dead. And there was no body to bury, either. They were told he’d been exploring the snow-covered peaks on Portugal’s Spanish border when he fell into a raging mountain river and was swept away downstream, never to be found. Verena had been grief-stricken and, more than that, desperately afraid. She honestly did not see how they could go on.
    The Earl of Stancliffe was in Bath when the news arrived, taking the waters for his health; they heard nothing from him, and after his insults Verena did not expect to. Then Lucas wrote to her, to send his condolences. She was horrified by his duplicity. She didn’t understand how he could pretend to care. She’d secretly fallen in love with a gallant hero, who’d asked her to trust him, when all the time he’d been planning to leave the army, and must also have betrayed her infatuation with him to his grandfather.
    Of course she burned Lucas’s letter and did not reply. He wrote again. This time she did not even read it before destroying it.
    Verena had her father’s letters for consolation. He was acompulsive writer, and as she leafed through them, with their vivid descriptions of the wild hills of his mother’s country where he’d felt so at home, she could almost hear Jack Sheldon’s loud voice, almost see his dancing dark eyes, which had glittered exultantly as he confided to her, on the night just before he left for the last time, that summer two years ago, that he had discovered a great secret, something that would make them all rich.
    Oh, Papa
. She hadn’t believed him. But how she missed him: