PROLOGUE
Yorkshire, England
On a road north of Ripon
July 7, 1817
King Louis the XIV had arrived to deliver the baby.
Lottie feared she was hallucinating.
And then, just as quickly, she feared the opposite. That the gentleman racing toward her in the antiquated purple justacorps, white-powdered wig, and rouged face paint wasnot, in fact, a figment of her imagination.
After all, the man clutched a doctor’s bag in his hand, and their footman, Danny, was at his heels.
How could this gentleman possibly be a physician?
Lottie’s sister, Margaret—Lady Frank Fulton to the world at large—moaned and gasped her way through another labor pain, her hand squeezing Lottie’s in a vise.
“I think the doctor has finally arrived, Margaret dearest,” Lottie murmured, wiping perspiration off her sister’s forehead.
“At long last!” Margaret groaned, her blue eyes fluttering open. “He will be a most welcome sight!”
Lottie wondered if her sister would feel the same in five minutes when the physician and Danny reached them.
The men had left their horses back on the roadway and were hopping the hundred or so yards across the boggy meadow toward the tree where Margaret lay. Danny carried a pile of folded linen under one arm and a bucket of water in the other.
The doctor, for his part, struggled to jump from clump-to-clump of dry grass, as the flared skirt of his long justacorps obscured the view of his boots. The curls of his enormous peruke extended nearly to his waist, sending white puffs of hair powder aloft with each lurching leap. And . . . was that a mole-patch on his cheek?
Regardless, the doctor’s clothing was a solid hundred years out of fashion—ancient attire for a man who appeared far younger.
Was this the medical care one received so far out in the country? Or was this more a case of beggars-not-choosers?
Lottie was unsure.
She had never assisted a sister in giving birth atop carriage blankets under a sprawling oak tree.
She squinted as the men bounded closer.
But if not a physician, who was the man? A costumier? An asylum fugitive? A masked-ball enthusiast?
Hmmm.
Hallucination was still a possibility. The situation certainly had a dreamlike quality.
A grunt of distress had Lottie turning back to Margaret. Her sister lay with her eyes closed, panting and whimpering through yet another labor pain. Lottie dabbed Margaret’s brow again with a handkerchief, hating that she was so helpless in the face of her sister’s suffering.
This was certainly not how her sister had envisioned bringing her second child into the world. Margaret had despaired for years, believing herself barren. She had been overjoyed to be increasing once more.
Of course, Lottie considered it decidedly ironic that the actual childbirth had come upon them so unexpectedly. But, alas, babies had much in common with time and tides—they waited for no man.
Lottie was encouraging Margaret through her labor pain when a doctor’s case landed near her elbow.
She glanced up. The doctor stood over her, rimmed in light and appearing like a ghostly apparition of centuries past.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said. “I see ye are in a wee spot of trouble.”
The doctor’s commonplace words were a sharp contrast to the chaos of his attire. Moreover, his voice sounded so . . . prosaic, laced with a doctor’s forced cheeriness and threads of Scotland.
