by Anne Stuart
Table of Contents
Other Anne Stuart novels from Bell Bridge Books
Prince of Magic
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
Please visit these websites for more information about Anne Stuart
About the Author
NO TIME TO LOSE.
“They wouldn’t touch her,” Peter said in a soft, savage voice.
“They would,” Gabriel said. “They’re looking for a virgin sacrifice . . .”
“I’ll kill them.”
“After we make sure Jane is safe,” Gabriel said. “She’s probably back at the tower with Lizzie right now, cursing all men. Come along.”
Gabriel came to a halt a few yards from the base of the tower. “Someone’s been here,” he said. “A carriage and horses. And it looks as if someone was dragged . . .”
Gabriel disappeared into the shadowy tower, taking the steps three at a time. He stopped just inside the door as a feeling of cold, bitter fury washed over him. The place was a shambles of overturned furniture. Lizzie hadn’t given up without a fight.
Gabriel didn’t turn when Peter came up behind him. “They’ve taken her, Peter. I think they’ve taken them both.”
“I’ll kill them,” Peter said with devastating calm. “If they’ve harmed a hair on Janey’s head . . .”
“We’ve got to find them first,” Gabriel said in an icy voice. “Then you can kill them . . .”
Other Anne Stuart novels from Bell Bridge Books
Lady Fortune
Barrett’s Hill
Romantic Suspense
Nightfall
Shadow Lover
Prince of Magic
by
Anne Stuart
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-522-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-540-9
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 by Anne Kristine Stuart Ohlrogge
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
A mass market edition of this book was published by Zebra Books Kensington in 1998
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Dedication
Books have an unfortunate habit of taking their own sweet time to be born, and all the pushing and shoving and forcing simply won’t hurry the process. Lots of thanks and love to the Merrie Midwives of Genie-Romex, in particular Saint Jo Beverley and Saint Teresa Hill, without whom I would have been in a major mess.
Prologue
Wickham, Dorset, April 1765
IT WAS THE first night of spring. April had come to Dorset, and there was no way that Elizabeth Penshurst could spend one more moment cooped up inside the parsonage.
Everyone was sound asleep. Her five half-brothers, ranging in age from a sturdy seventeen to a precociously charming three and a half, were worn-out from their various exertions. Her father, the Very Reverend William Penshurst, slept the sleep of the righteous, his helpmate, Adelia, snoring softly by his side. No one would hear as Lizzie crept down the back stairs and out through the kitchen garden. The town of Wickham was a sober village of steady habits. No one would be up late, peering out the window to see the rector’s outspoken daughter go flitting down the midnight streets to the forest. Even her nemesis, Elliott Maynard, had left for London more than a week ago, and he wouldn’t be anywhere near to spy on her.
Odd that she would think of her most determined suitor as her nemesis. It wasn’t as if she had anything against marriage in particular. Her father and stepmother seemed very happy with each other, and most of the people of her acquaintance seemed content with their lot.
But then, most of the people of her acquaintance didn’t have a wicked habit of running off to the woods whenever they had a moment to spare. They didn’t dance in the moonlight, converse with the animals, sing to the trees, or lie stretched out on the soft earth, breathing in the spring air.
The only one who did so was Old Peg, and half the village considered her some sort of witch. Old Peg had little use for the villagers, but she must have recognized a kindred spirit in the minister’s dreamy daughter. For the last few years she’d welcomed Lizzie into her forest, taught her the lore of herbs and trees, taught her to find her home in the woods.
Now Old Peg was gone, decently if reluctantly buried in the churchyard with all the proper Christian words said over her free spirit by the disapproving Mr. Penshurst. Old Peg would have hated it. Lizzie was the one who had found her body, of course. If she’d had enough strength, she would have buried Old Peg herself, but the old woman weighed a good thirteen stone, and Lizzie couldn’t manage. Instead she’d had to stand by Old Peg’s grave and weep, the only mourner.
It had been two weeks since Old Peg had been buried, two weeks since Lizzie had sat and listened to Elliott’s doleful pronouncements on mad old women and the dangers of the woods. Two weeks since she’d flatly refused his offer of marriage.
Her father had been deeply distressed. William Penshurst tended to see the best in people, and what better mate could be found for his daughter than his own curate? And surely his daughter was too fine a creature to be critical of Maynard’s thinning hair, expanding paunch, or slightly fishlike profile.
It wasn’t Elliott’s unprepossessing appearance that appalled Lizzie; it was his small, critical nature and the way his moist eyes watched her when her father wasn’t around. The way he always found some excuse to touch her with his soft, damp hands. Never indecently, just possessively, leaving Lizzie with the desperate need to scrub whatever portion of her anatomy he’d happened to grasp, be it her hand, h
er wrist, her elbow, or the small of her back.
But Elliott was gone, having taken his latest dismissal with a high dudgeon. Lizzie had little doubt he’d return to renew his courtship, and the thought of those upcoming battles was deeply unsettling. She loved her father and stepmother as well as her five little brothers, and she would have done almost anything to please them. Anything short of marrying Elliott Maynard.
As for the Penshursts, they viewed Lizzie as some sort of exotic creature, much beloved but never completely understood. She took after her own mother, a fey, impractical creature who’d had the bad taste to die in childbirth, leaving her husband with an infant daughter and no idea what to do with her.
Fortunately Adelia had appeared on the scene. She had loved Lizzie dearly, as much as she loved the five little pledges of affection she’d presented to her husband, but she was a woman entirely without imagination while Lizzie had far too much of it.
On a warm spring night, Lizzie’s family’s expectations were a distant worry, and Elliott’s determined courtship was miles away. For tonight she could go back to the woods, where she hadn’t been since Old Peg had been buried. She could go and say goodbye in her own way.
No one stirred as she crept down the narrow back stairs. The kitchen was huge and deserted, the two servant girls employed by the Penshursts lived in the village, and no one would be likely to notice that Lizzie wasn’t in bed as a proper minister’s daughter should be in the middle of the night.
It was the first truly warm night of the year, she thought as she slipped out into the kitchen garden. She hadn’t even bothered with a shawl—there was no need for it. She wore her soft leather dancing slippers, but the ground was damp, and someone would be sure to notice if she tracked mud into the house. She took them off, setting them carefully by the garden gate, and took off toward the woods, reveling in the feel of the new grass beneath her bare feet.
The woods around Wickham weren’t that large—really not much more than a thick copse bordering a nearby estate. Old Peg had paid little attention to whose land was whose—she simply lived in the forest as was her right.
The moon was almost half-full, a rich, creamy crescent in the blue-black sky. Even on a moonless night Lizzie could have found her way to the tiny grove where stones stood sentinel. It was a holy place, though she knew her father would pale at such a thought, a magic place where Old Peg’s soul would linger, even as her body turned to dust.
She reached the center of the circle, tilting her head back to drink in the moonlight, feeling her unbound hair ripple down her back. Without hesitation she stripped off her plain wool dress and tossed it beyond the circle. She was clad only in a light shift, no properly boned corset, no restricting drawers, nothing but a filmy layer of cotton over her body. She raised her arms to the moonlight and began to dance.
She danced for her trammeled soul and the respectable future she wasn’t going to be able to avoid for much longer. She danced for the moon and the stars and the soft breeze that tumbled her wicked red hair about her face. She danced for everything she could never have, and she danced for Old Peg.
This would be her last trip to the woods. Tomorrow she would become what her family wanted, a dutiful young lady of the parish, practical, pragmatic, a credit to her parents. Her mother’s fickle blood would vanish, and Lizzie would become Miss Elizabeth Penshurst, a good, solid creature like her stepmother.
She would marry the first man who asked her, as long as he didn’t sneak and lurk and disapprove like Elliott Maynard. As long as he didn’t look like Elliott Maynard. She would marry and have children and leave the forest to the woodland creatures who belonged there.
But for one last night she would dance. She sang beneath her breath, old songs that Peg had taught her, songs of love lost and love found, and she whirled and swayed, turned and dipped, lost in the feel of the night air and the strength of her young body.
Until she turned and came to a dead stop, coming face-to-face with Elliott Maynard’s smug expression. And her father’s look of absolute horror.
Hernewood, Yorkshire
IT WAS APRIL, warmer than usual for the demanding climate of North Yorkshire, and Gabriel Durham could stay inside no longer. He closed the ancient tome he’d been poring over and rose, stretching his long, lean body. He’d managed to weather his first winter in more than a dozen years in the place where he’d spent his childhood.
It wasn’t the place where he’d been born—he had no earthly idea where that was, though he presumed it was somewhere near London. It didn’t matter. This was where he belonged, and it had taken far too long for him to realize it.
But realize it he had, coming back to his dubious heritage just as the first snows had begun to fly, coming back to Hernewood Forest.
Now winter was over, and even though a chill still lingered in the air, the daffodils were blooming riotously, the sheep had begun to lamb, and the first of May was fast approaching.
He should have been looking forward to it. If it weren’t for the presence of a group of bored, self-indulgent parasites whom he could only presume followed him in his retreat from London, he could enjoy the feast of Beltane with all his heart and soul. He had every intention of doing so anyway.
Beltane was one of the oldest festivals in the pre-Christian world that had once been Britain. Even though it was now dressed up as May Day, everything went back to a time when the Druids ruled Britain with a scholarly hand.
Of course, people like the Chiltons and their friends preferred tales of bloodshed and human sacrifice. According to the Roman historians, the ancient priests of Britain used to regularly herd large groups of people into wicker cages and set them aflame for no discernible reason. Gabriel had always taken leave to doubt such horrific tales. After all, the Romans had just conquered Britain—it was in their best interest to paint the powerful locals in an unflattering light.
But in the last few years, all things Druidic had become immensely popular, and most people preferred the bloody tales. Gabriel had no particular interest in being the voice of reason. He was fascinated by his studies for their own right, not because he had anything particular to prove.
He’d been a studious boy—it was no wonder his supposed father, Sir Richard Durham, an avid sportsman who avoided the written word as if it were plague-ridden, had had nothing but contempt for him. That contempt had only spurred Gabriel deeper into his studies, until he’d broken free in an act of desperate rebellion.
He’d tasted all the fruits of the flesh and found, after a while, that they were empty. London was a noisy, clamorous bore, and he’d had his fill of society to last him the rest of his life. The simple people of Hernewood were far more to his liking. The simple life, alone in his ramshackle tower with his books and his solitude, kept him perfectly content. If he needed companionship, there was always his old friend Peter or Gabriel’s sister Jane.
If he needed sex, he could find that as well, from any number of discreet, willing women in the area. But what he needed right now was peace.
The night air still held a taste of winter, but he didn’t bother to return to the tower for a cloak. He’d learned to endure hardships, both self-imposed and those put upon him by others, and he’d survived. He was seldom sick, and the deserted woods that surrounded Hernewood Abbey wouldn’t harm him.
He moved through the moonlight, silent as a ghost, circling past the skeletal remains of the refectory. Hernewood Abbey had once been one of the richest abbeys in the country, before King Henry decided to give free rein to his greed. It was still unsurpassingly lovely, even in its ruined state. And it was, blessedly, his.
There were no ghosts roaming in the moonlight, he thought with a wry smile. The ghostly monks would profoundly disapprove of the rites of Beltane: the Maypole and the fires and the merrymaking. They were probably conferring with sepulchral gloom over the wickedness of moder
n civilization.
Still, he had the sudden longing for even a ghostly encounter. He cherished his solitude, he needed it as most people needed air and water, but for a brief moment in the heart of the midnight woods, he felt achingly alone.
He closed his eyes and saw her. A faery creature from another place and another time, a long-legged sprite with flame red hair and only a wisp of garment, dancing in the moonlight. When he opened his eyes she was gone, a figment of his imagination, and he shook his head, managing a wry grin.
He had no need of scantily clad dryads, no matter how enticing. That blend of erotic innocence teased him, but he needed no more ghosts. He had no need of anyone at all.
Just the same, perhaps a visit to the talented widow in York might be called for. Before the fertility rites of Beltane made him dream of something far less practical.
And made him actually long for something to disturb his quiet days.
Chapter One
Hernewood, Yorkshire
ELIZABETH PENSHURST, twenty-year-old spinster of the parish of Upper Wickham, Dorset, climbed down from the traveling coach and looked around her. The day was crisp and cool with a strong breeze coming down from the north, whipping her skirts around her legs, rustling the leaves overhead in a whispered warning. Her box was set down beside her, and then the coachman climbed back onto his perch with a haste that seemed oddly suspect.
“You certain they know you’re coming, Miss?” he asked in a gruff voice. “I could take you further, leave you at the Boar’s Knees up ahead a ways. It’s not a fit place for a lady, but neither are these woods, I’m thinking.”
Elizabeth, sometimes known as Lizzie, looked at the towering trees surrounding the market cross. At one point there must have been a thriving village here in the center of nowhere, but now nothing remained but the old stone cross.
