all the war stories he’d heard when the major was hunting alongside his father and knew that he had no guarantee of his return. Fleetingly, he thought to tell her of the danger again in the hope that it would waken in her a sympathy akin to love. But he cared for her too much to earn her affection by manipulation. Instead, he did what he’d always done. He reassured her.
“I promise, Maggie,” he said quietly. “I’ll come back. You will be quite different when I return. You will be all grown up, a lady.”
She looked at him seriously and then said, “I don’t think I noticed it until now. But you’ve already gone and grown up without me. You’re leaving me behind, and I hate you for it.” She took a few steps away from him and stood for a while with her face turned towards the house and her arms crossed in front of her. Then she turned around again and looked at him with the tears running down her cheeks. “Nigel?”
“I know,” he said quietly. “You don’t hate me.”
She nodded, an apology and an acceptance passing between them as it always did, without words needed. They walked in silence to the stables, not speaking again until the separation demanded it. Margaret handed her horse over to the groom and then turned to leave. Nigel reached out and touched her shoulder fleetingly before dropping his hand back to his side.
“I won’t forget you, Queen Medb,” he said, harkening back to their childhood games where he knew she would feel the safest.
She turned around, and he saw that this parting had aged her strangely, as though his very leaving had drawn her from childhood into womanhood at last. She nodded. “Come back to me,” she said softly.
Then she turned and was gone.
Chapter 1
1816
Margaret stepped up onto the block and deftly swung herself into the side-saddle, arranging her skirts about herself. She had grown more accustomed to this more ladylike mode of riding as the years had passed, and no longer resented it as she had when she was a girl.
She knew many women who were accomplished riders to outstrip a man even while riding side-saddle, and she had determined to build the skill herself. It was more conducive, anyway, to the long and heavy skirts that she now wore as befitted her station.
It was days like today, when she was travelling about her father’s estate visiting the tenants, that she felt most self-conscious of her attire. She was no longer the girl in loose skirts riding along the cliffs with the wind in her hair. Now she was quite proper, and even this, her most simple riding habit and gown, seemed garishly fine beside the farmers and sheepherders that she had been visiting all day. She raised her hand in farewell to the man and woman standing together in the door of their little home and turned her horse back into the main fairway.
Carrie, her maid, had accompanied her on the day’s travels for the sake of propriety, but at the crossing that led home again, Margaret turned to her with a smile and bade her go back to the main house.
“I have some business in town,” she said. “I don’t believe I will need your company there.”
Carrie looked at her for a long moment and then said quietly, “My lady, I will give you time alone if that is what you desire. But you should know that Lord Somerville asked me to tell him the next time you went to visit your friend in the village.”
Margaret sighed. “I already know that, Carrie. That is why I am asking you to go home now. You can have deniability. You can say that you parted ways with me after the tenant farmers and do not know what I did after that.”
Carrie bit her lip. “It’s not proper.”
“I appreciate your concern for my safety. But I have made this decision and I would like you to respect it.” Margaret had learnt this trick from her father, how to speak in a voice of authority when it was truly necessary. She saw Carrie accept the situation with a nod and then hurry on her way home.
Margaret turned her horse towards the village and picked the pace up to a trot. As she drew near, she hugged the river where it curved along the outer businesses on the High Street, taking the back path so that there would be minimal gossip, and found