Chapter One
Bedfordshire, 1852
“There is mywild, untamed friend,” were the words that welcomed Eleanor Blackwood to Angsley Hall under a dreary, gray sky.
As soon as she stepped out of her coach, the wind whipping at her cloak, she was enveloped by her dearest friend, Beryl, who had recently married a pirate, or so she liked to say.
Since Eleanor knew very well that Captain Philip Carruthers was a perfectly upstanding sea captain, she ignored Beryl’s teasing accusations regarding her husband, though it would have been an exciting notion—her friend capturing and marrying a dangerous pirate.
Together, she and Beryl Angsley Carruthers had made up many exciting tales in the five years they’d known each other, growing from gawky girls to polished young women. Perhaps no tale was as good as Beryl’s true-life adventure, being kidnapped by Chinese pirates and rescued by her dashing Philip, who then married her.
The captain, himself, was right behind his wife, ready to give Eleanor a hug as soon as Beryl released her.
By happy chance, they were visiting Beryl’s parents in the Angsley family home in Bedfordshire. Though Eleanor’s final destination was her sister Maggie’s home, Turvey House, barely a couple miles away, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop in and see her best friend.
Besides, Beryl and Philip were expecting a child, and from Eleanor’s experience with her two older sisters, after a woman reached a certain size, she simply wanted to go home and stay there. And home for the Carruthers was hundreds of miles southwest on the coast of Cornwall, where Beryl and her sea captain husband resided in a house on the water’s edge. Thus, Eleanor might not see her again for many months, if not a year.
“How was your trip?” Beryl asked. “I cannot believe you came by yourself, all the way from Sheffield.”
True, it was a three-day journey from the north, but as the baby of the family and a mature nineteen, Eleanor thought she’d been coddled long enough.Or stifled, as she sometimes saw it.
“You went all the way to the Orient,” she pointed out to Beryl as they sat in the parlor with tea and lemon cake, the happy parents-to-be seated side by side on the sofa.
“I was with my father and the British Navy,” her friend declared. “You’ve done something I’ve never done—stayed in a country inn alone.”
They all laughed, but, in truth, Eleanor had felt both unsettled her first night traveling and also very grown up, while eating her meal alone at a roadside inn.
The Earl of Lindsey, married to Eleanor’s eldest sister, Jenny, had chosen every stopping point and sent her in his luxurious coach with a driver and a footman, both armed. Thus, Eleanor had been as safe as if she were in her family’s home in Sheffield.
Both in the carriage and at each inn, she had devoured her favorite Gothic novels. Some, she had read many times, such as Mrs. Shelley’sFrankenstein, and the Brontes’Wuthering HeightsandJane Eyre. Others, she was reading for the first time, includingCastle of OtrantoandMysteries of Udolpho, which Jenny had given her for the trip.
Alone in the carriage for hours, with the unnerving tone of the stories filling her head, Eleanor had felt goosebumps each time the wind rattled the windows. And each evening, in a strange bedchamber, she had firmly closed the shutters and the drapes, keeping the bedside lamp lit late into the night, while the notion of dark and drafty castles filled her brain.
“I’m so glad you could stop here before going on to see Maggie,” Beryl said.
Eleanor would stay a couple days until Beryl and Philip left, and then carry on to her middle sister’s home. Maggie had married Beryl’s cousin, John Angsley, the Earl of Cambrey, and was the reason Beryl and Eleanor had first met. Luckily, the Angsley brothers, Beryl’s father, Harold, and his older brother, Gideon, the former Earl of Cambrey, had kept their estates—Angsley Hall and Turvey House—so close, making it easy for Eleanor to visit first her best friend and then her sister.
A flash of ginger-orange heralded the arrival of Leo, the captain’s cat, which went everywhere with him, including out to sea. Suddenly, it jumped onto the sofa, walked across his lap, using him as a steppingstone to get to Beryl.
“Oof,” Philip exclaimed. “Damn cat has pile-drivers for paws. He got me right in the—”
“Philip!” Beryl exclaimed, rolling her eyes before stroking Leo as he wedged himself between husband and wife and settled down into a ball.
“He’s beautiful,” Eleanor said.
All at once, Beryl turned to her husband of just over a year. “You’re being awfully quiet.”
“I am the same as always,” Philip told her, leaning back, crossing one ankle atop the knee of his other leg. “When you are in the room, there is no need for me to speak.”
Both girls stared at him. Eleanor wondered if her friend would take offense. Beryl did tend to chat as much as a magpie, but it was something Eleanor cherished about her. They could talk all day about nothing and everything, and never tire of it.
“Hm,” Beryl mused, then smiled at him. “Because you are captivated by my beauty whenever you’re near me?”
“Precisely,” he said, and they shared a lover’s glance, which nearly made Eleanor feel as if she were intruding.
Bringing them back to a less romantic subject, she asked, “When are you next going to sea?”
Her friend often went with her husband, who was responsible for taking Beryl’s father, Lord Harold Angsley, the queen’s ambassador to Spain, across the Channel and through the Straits of Gibraltar. Beryl had promised someday Eleanor could go, too. She probably had to stand in line behind her friend’s five younger brothers and sisters, whose voices, even then, Eleanor could hear in various parts of the manor.
