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‘Was it worth it? Throwing your life away for a couple of birds, and you didn’t even get to taste them?’

Gritting her teeth on a wave of nauseous horror, she didn’t attempt to respond. His gloating turned her stomach and in blind terror she seized on the one comfort she had left.

I didn’t throw my life away for a couple of birds. I did it to save Peter, and nothing could be more worthy than that.

A dim light had begun to show through the trees. Most likely it was another gamekeeper’s lantern, this time mounted on the cart that would carry her to the prison in the next town, and she hoped the feeble glow wouldn’t illuminate the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.

Surely Peter must have arrived home by now? Had Pa struggled up from his chair to let him in, she wondered dully, the colour draining from his face when he learned what had happened to the daughter he called his right hand? It would be hard to carry on working their plot of land without her, but even worse if both she and Peter had been taken, the accident that had shattered Pa’s arm and leg months ago leaving him unable to use so much as a rake. At least her sacrifice meant her family wouldn’t be evicted for allowing their farm to go fallow. Anthony would look for any excuse to turf a tenant off his land, although it wasn’t easy to raise a smile when she thought of exactly what that sacrifice would entail.

‘There’s your carriage, my lady.’

The gamekeeper’s voice was mocking as he steered her out of the treeline and onto a rough track beyond. One direction led eventually to the grand front drive of Wellbourne House while the other cut through the woods to the town of Marchingham eight miles away, and her heart sank like a stone to see the cart waiting for her was pointed towards the latter.

A third man—yet another she had never seen before—was adjusting the carthorse’s tack, although he turned when he heard them approach.

‘Found her, then? Where’s the other one?’

‘She won’t say,’ snorted the mastiff’s handler. ‘Too stupid to know what’s good for her. Personally, if I was headed for the lonely noose, I think I’d like some company.’

The gamekeeper chuckled as if at a fine joke, sending a chill down Meg’s spine. ‘Go on. In you get.’

He twisted her arm harder, making her swallow a sharp cry. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing she was terrified and in pain and she clenched her jaw tightly as she stepped up to the cart and prepared to climb inside.

The tears she was trying so hard to hold back were beginning to sting. They would fall if she didn’t do something to stop them and so she screwed her eyes closed, trusting her shaking hand to guide her as she took hold of the cart’s rail and lifted her foot.

A deep voice cut through the beat of blood in her ears.

‘Stop. Where are you taking that woman?’

Jacob frowned as he took in the unpleasant scene before him. He was tired, hungry and wanted nothing more than to reach Wellbourne House for a meal and hot bath, and yet his path was currently blocked by…what, exactly?

In the darkness he could just make out three men bundling a clearly reluctant woman into the back of a cart, and the crease between his almost black eyebrows intensified when one of the men shot him an insolent leer, the stranger’s craggy face lit by the dim glow of a lantern.

‘I don’t see as that’s any of your business.’

Jacob’s eyes narrowed. On a different night he might have been more measured, but while aching from hours on horseback he found he had little patience, his irritation building as he slid from the saddle and landed heavily on the ground.

‘You see wrong. Answer the question.’

The other man turned to face him more directly. There was a suggestion of aggression in the squaring of the stranger’s shoulders, but it was the unfortunate woman behind him that caught every thread of Jacob’s attention, his focus shifting to her so abruptly that any potential threats fled his mind.

‘Meg?’

The woman’s head snapped up. She’d been taking advantage of the distraction to try to wriggle free of the man holding her arm, but when the lamplight fell fully across her face he knew he was right.

A bear trap slammed shut around his chest.

Recognition sent a static shock crackling through him as he stared at her, into the widening hazel eyes he’d tried but never managed to forget. She looked so different and yet so familiar it was as if he’d seen her only the day before. Much time had passed but still he’d know her anywhere, even the darkness and a separation of five long years unable to fool him—or his heart.

He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Just as when they had been younger, she possessed the ability to render him speechless and she exercised it again now, her stunned expression doing nothing to detract from the beauty of the face he still thought was the loveliest he’d ever seen. It was less rounded, the countenance of a grown woman instead of a girl, although something in the hollows beneath her cheekbones suggested she’d known hunger rather than just the ticking away of so many days.

She was thin now rather than merely slender, he registered in some far-flung corner of his consciousness where reason still reigned. Had her father’s farm suffered a lean year, the small plot of land the Wheelers had leased from his own family for generations finally growing barren? Or were the changes his brother had wrought on the Wellbourne estate somehow responsible, perhaps the enclosing of the land already starting to bite…?

At last, he regained the ability to speak. ‘Take your hands off her. Now.’

He watched Meg’s gaze skip from him to the man clinging to her and back again. She still looked as though she couldn’t believe her eyes, although her captor seemed far more decided.

The man’s lip rose. ‘On whose word?’