But not her. She had finally come to appreciate her freedom after a summer spent searching her soul for answers to what she wanted from life. It was just this; it was merely to ride her land and live free.
This was the farthest she had been alone since coming to Lark House in the spring, a wounded, frightened mouse that trembled at the shadow of a hawk. But she was healing. She was stronger. Now she rode alone again. Now she felt the throbbing pulse of freedom in her heart.
She dug in her heels and Cassie bolted. They rode like the wind down the long sloping sweep of her land, her home, pins tumbling from her restrained hair and her auburn-tinted tresses flowing down her cambric-clad back, tangled curls fluttering in the breeze. She laughed out loud, thinking what people would say if they saw her.
She would be taken away to Bedlam! Everyone thought her so prim and proper, but it was a sham, a ruse, a cloak she pulled around herself to conceal her true nature, her wholly inappropriate wildness, from the ton. But here at Lark House, the ton did not exist. Even her friends—Lady Emily, who had been so good to her, and Lady Dianne Delafont, Dodo as she was affectionately called, Emily’s aunt, who even now stayed with her as she recovered her equanimity—even they did not know this side of her.
And never would. No one must ever know the true self she hid beneath gray gowns and gray shawls, her hair constricted and tortured into a tight bun, all spark and spirit in her eyes hidden by the down-sweep of thick fringed eyelashes. They would turn from her in disgust and revulsion if they knew that Maisie’s wildness had its form of outlet in May. She might not be sexually promiscuous, but she hated the strictures placed on her by society. She was fit only for the country, she thought, pulling her heaving mount to a halt near a copse of trees deep in the valley, to catch her breath. She was fit only for the country and her own company, and she would live out her days at Lark House, trying to help the people of her village in whatever way she could.
She envied women like Lady Emily, her niece Celestine, and her aunt Dodo Delafont. Those women were all effortlessly ladylike, cultured, womanly. They fit into society like a delicate hand in a lovely kid glove, smoothly and without a wrinkle, and yet were still themselves. They deserved all of the adulation the men around them offered them.
No man would want a woman like her, May thought, stroking Cassie’s neck and murmuring to the mare. What man wanted a wild woman, a girl who wore breeches and curried her own horse, who would spend hours—days if she could—in the forest with nature as her only companion? But it was all right; she never wanted to marry anyway. She could not imagine, despite what Emily had told her, letting a man touch her in the intimate ways a man must to beget a child when he married a woman. Emily had said that it was a beautiful thing, the intimacy between man and woman, but that was ridiculous! It was an animalistic rutting ritual, disguised by society’s veneer of chivalrous conduct toward women, a veneer that was stripped away as soon as a man became aroused. No one could tell her differently. No man could ever make her want to touch him, although—
She let Cassie walk and crop the tender shoots of grass near the edge of the wooded copse as she let her mind drift back to Etienne. Etienne Roulant Delafont. If he had not come to rescue her, she might have been taken forcibly by Captain Dempster. She had escaped the captain’s grasp by kneeing him, as a groom of hers once called it, “where it counts.” But Dempster had a gun, and if Etienne—handsome, gallant Frenchman that he was—had not been there with his magnificent stallion Théron, she might be lying under the ground six feet now, instead of riding on this glorious autumn morning across the grasslands of her home.
And she never had been able to thank him properly. He was dead, his splendid young life cut short in his escape to the continent—some said he was responsible for a series of attacks on the Marquess of Sedgely, her friend Emily’s taciturn husband, and that he was escaping “justice”—when his boat went down in the channel, near Dover off the Kentish coast. Not far from Lark House, in fact.
She had suffered a piercing pain on hearing about his death, and it still brought her such great sadness. She could have loved him like a brother—yes, like a brother! She told her mind that firmly, though her brain insisted that the hot feelings that coursed through her that morning as she rode in front of him all the way to London were definitely not sisterly. But she must not dwell on it! She must not linger on the sweetness of his lilting French voice, his handsome face, his perfect form. He was the most gorgeous young man she had ever in her life seen, and now he was entombed in the frigid depths of the channel. It was too painful to think about!
She slid from Cassie’s back, wiped the moisture from her eyes and led her mare by the bridle, comforted by the soft snuffling of Cassie in her ear as they entered the cooling shade of the copse. There was a path here somewhere, she thought . . . ah, there it was. This was the back way into the copse. As a child, mounted on one of Cassie’s predecessors, a small shaggy pony she named Jack, she would come this way after escaping from the groom who was supposed to be riding with her. She and Jack would wander through the woods—a forest that seemed deep and dark then, but was really a light-filled, planned glade—and would come to the folly.
She stopped and swept her tumbled mane of curls back. She had almost forgotten the folly’s existence but there it was, her fairy castle in her youth, her perfect hideaway. She would ride Jack into the woods, carrying pilfered fruit and meat pies wrapped in paper, and there she would spend the day. Mother would be busy with her houseguests, invariably male and invariably more than one, and so she would wander off.
Sometimes she would be a fairy or a princess, but often she would be a peasant girl. Anything but Lady Grishelda May van Hoffen. It was a magical place. Things would appear, and she often wondered if the wood fairies used it as a home when she was not around. Blankets would show up out of nowhere, food, dishes, clothing—
Her mother probably used the folly as the ideal place for an intimate tryst with some of her unsavory lovers. She released Cassie, who would stay close by, and strolled around, gazing at the old stone structure.
It was octagonal, constructed of smooth gray granite sometime early in the last century. No one knew why it had been built so far from Lark House when most follies were built to be admired, at the top of a hill or near an ornamental lake. But this one was buried in a planned glade of alder and beech, tall slim trees that let a dappling of sunshine through their leaves even in midsummer. It was constructed with an open doorway and high, gothic-arched windows that started several feet off the ground. The stone was covered in dark moss near the ground, and thickets of ivy had grown up, obscuring the lovely classical shape of the windows. Tumbled masses of old roses bunched and bloomed at its base.
Maybe she would have the delightful old structure repaired and cleaned up, the encroaching ivy torn down, the leaves cleaned out . . . she stopped in her perusal at the front of the building. The doorway. The stone step that led into the folly was stained dark, and the stain seemed somehow fresh.
She frowned as an odd sensation prickled up her neck. Had some poor animal, wounded by poachers or by a predator, crawled in there to die? She slowly approached, her heart pounding. This was the first time she had been out riding alone since she had come back from London and maybe she was still a little nervous. For months she had restricted herself to rides in the park at the front of Lark House, the side that faced the road. At first she had ventured nowhere without an armed groom, convinced that Captain Dempster would come after her and get her, even though he had been tracked to the Continent by Baxter, Emily’s husband. Her fear had abated gradually, but still she had not gone far alone.
But then this morning she had awoken from a restless sleep with the knowledge that she was giving in to them all, to Vicar Dougherty and his well-meaning guidance, and to Sir Tolliver Gowan, her nearest neighbor, and his wife Jenny, the closest thing to a friend she had had before meeting Emily and Celestine. And she was even allowing Dodo to plan her day-to-day li
fe, though sometimes there was a glint in the elderly woman’s eyes that unnerved her with its perspicacity.
And now she was here, and the feeling of meeting life head-on was thrumming through her veins stronger, pulsing powerfully through her body. It was a nervous kind of energy, like she was going to burst at the seams with a new need to face life rather than sidestepping it, as she had for years. Shaking herself out of her curious unwillingness to act, she stepped forward, stooped and touched the dark stain on the folly threshold. It was not wet, but she had the feeling that it had not long been dry. She looked up and tried to gaze into the interior of the folly, but it was dark. The windows were covered in thick vines, like Sleeping Beauty’s palace in one of her favorite childhood stories.
Her heart beat even faster. She had never been a coward. If there was an animal hurt in her folly, she wanted to know. If it was not too badly hurt, she would take it back for Bill, her head groom, to fix up, as she did when a child. There had always been a cage at the back of the stable holding a vole or a ferret, rabbit or mouse that she had retrieved in the woods. If the animal was suffering though, and too far gone, she would kill it to put it out of its misery. She had courage enough to see nothing suffer, she hoped.
She wished she had brought a lamp. The gloom in the folly was almost impenetrable. She peered in.
“Hallo?” she called, feeling more than a little silly as her voice echoed in the thicket.
There was a sound, and she froze on the doorstep. It was a scraping sound! Oh, how she wished for a light! She strained her eyes into the darkness. Was that darker area something, over near the wall under one of the ivy-covered windows? What could it be?
There was that sound again, a scraping! And a . . . a moan? It was ghostly, the noise oddly echoing in the stone folly. She picked up a branch that lay across the stone entrance and advanced, creeping into the folly, feeling her way with the toe of her riding boot. The moan again! It almost sounded human!
Her mouth was dry and she could not swallow; her hand was shaking so badly the dried leaves on the branch she held made a light whispering sound, like the wind in the trees. She was ready to flee if she saw the slightest movement. Her new bravado did not extend to challenging wild beasts or a wounded poacher, if that was what the moaning should turn out to be.
She sidled into the folly and stood with her back to the cool stone wall, letting her eyes become accustomed to the gloom. The dark patch near the window began to take a shape. It was a man! And he lay sleeping against the wall. Sleeping? Dead? No, not dead. He had moaned.
Who was he? What was he doing on her property? If he was an injured poacher he would need help or he might die, and she would not have a man’s death on her conscience, even if he eventually ended up swinging from the gibbet. Holding the branch up like a club she inched forward, waiting for any movement that would signal that he was feigning his unconscious state.
Forward, stop; forward more, pause again. Across the eight feet or so of the folly’s floor she made her way. Finally, she knelt down beside him, satisfied by his posture and the amount of blood that pooled around the poor man that he was no threat.
Was he still alive, or had she heard his death rattle?
She reached out to touch him, ignoring the auburn curls that fell forward when she bent. He was warm. She put her slim fingers under his scruffy chin and turned his face up to the thin thread of light that had found a path through the ivy. She gazed and took in a breath with a choking gasp.
“Etienne!” she cried, and the sound of her voice echoed into the forest.
Classic Regency Romances
The Viscount’s Valentine
A Rogue’s Rescue
A Scandalous Plan
Reforming the Rogue
Lord St. Claire’s Angel
Noël’s Wish
The Earl of Hearts
The Mad Herringtons
Romancing the Rogue
Married to a Rogue
Taming the Rogue
The Rogue’s Folly
A Matchmaker’s Christmas
Miss Truelove Beckons
Books by Donna Lea Simpson
Lady Anne and the Howl in the Dark
Revenge of the Barbary Ghost
Curse of the Gypsy
The Viscount’s Valentine
A Rogue’s Rescue
A Scandalous Plan
Reforming the Rogue
Lord St. Claire’s Angel
Noël’s Wish
The Earl of Hearts
Romancing the Rogue
Married to a Rogue
Taming the Rogue
The Rogue’s Folly
A Matchmaker’s Christmas
Miss Truelove Beckons
About the Author
Donna Lea Simpson is a nationally bestselling romance and mystery novelist with over twenty titles published in the last eleven years. An early love for the novels of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie was a portent of things to come; Donna believes that a dash of mystery adds piquancy to a romantic tale, and a hint of romance adds humanity to a mystery story. Besides writing romance and mystery novels and reading the same, Donna has a long list of passions: cats and tea, cooking and vintage cookware, cross-stitching and watercolor painting among them. Karaoke offers her the chance to warble Dionne Warwick tunes, and nature is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. A long walk is her favorite exercise, and a fruity merlot is her drink of choice when the tea is all gone. Donna lives in Canada.
The best writing advice, Donna believes, comes from the letters of Jane Austen. That author wrote, in an October 26, 1813, letter to her sister, Cassandra, “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” So true! But Donna is usually in a good humor for writing!
Contents
Cover
Miss Truelove Beckons
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
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
Excerpt from The Rogue’s Folly
Classic Regency Romances
Books by Donna Lea Simpson
About the Author
Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) Page 22
