All human wisdom is summed up in these two words,
—‘Wait and hope.’
Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo
Beasley Park
Somerset, England
Spring 1807
Beaten and bloody, Nicholas Seaton sat on the straw-covered floor of the loose box, his legs drawn up against his chest and his forehead resting on his knees. There was no possibility of escape. The doors of the loose box had been bolted shut and the wooden walls were made strong and thick, built to hold the most powerful of Squire Honeywell’s blooded stallions. Even so, Nicholas had wasted the first fifteen minutes of his imprisonment trying to force his way out, slamming his shoulders against the doors and striking out at the walls with all of his remaining strength, earning nothing for his exertions but a fresh set of cuts and bruises.
He’d spent the next fifteen minutes pacing the confines of the loose box like a caged lion, clenching and unclenching his fists, grinding his teeth, and mentally cursing every member of the landed gentry and aristocracy.
“I’ll see you hang for this, Seaton,” Frederick Burton-Smythe had said after driving Nicholas into the loose box at the end of his whip.
And they would hang him. Nicholas was as certain of that fact as he’d ever been of anything in his whole life. Only two years ago a young man no older than himself had been hanged for the paltry crime of stealing chickens from Fred’s father, Sir Roderick Burton-Smythe. To have stolen three priceless pieces of heirloom jewelry from Squire Honeywell’s only daughter, Miss Margaret, was surely grounds for drawing and quartering.
It made no difference that Nicholas hadn’t stolen anything. What good were his protestations of innocence? He was nothing but a lowly groom in Squire Honeywell’s stables. A servant. Even worse than a servant, in fact, for he was the bastard son of Squire Honeywell’s scullery maid, Jenny Seaton.
Jolly Jenny, as she was known, who—before arriving at the kitchen door of Beasley Park eighteen years ago, big with child and begging for scraps of food—had plied her trade at a hedge tavern in Market Barrow. A hedge tavern that had once been a favored haunt of the notorious highwayman Gentleman Jim.
“The mother a whore and the father a villain,” the vicar’s wife, Mrs. Applewhite, was fond of telling anyone who would listen. “Nicholas Seaton will come to no good, you mark my words.”
No. No one would believe he was innocent. Especially when his accuser was Frederick Burton-Smythe himself.
Nicholas and Fred had been enemies for as long as he could remember, but in the past year their dislike of each other had escalated to raw hatred. As usual, Maggie Honeywell was at the heart of the matter.
The thought of her caused Nicholas’s heart to wrench painfully. She was his best friend in the whole world. The one person he trusted. The only person he loved. A blood oath taken years ago had bound them together forever, when at Maggie’s request Nicholas had gamely cut his hand and pressed it firmly against the matching cut in hers. But he needed no ritual to bind himself to Maggie Honeywell. She was everything to him.
Unfortunately, she was also everything to her widowed father, and as the years went by and she began to bloom into a strikingly beautiful woman, she became everything to Fred Burton-Smythe as well.
Sir Roderick and Squire Honeywell had long ago agreed that one day their offspring would wed, thereby joining the two greatest estates in the district—Beasley Park and Letchford Hall. Nothing had ever been formalized, as far as Nicholas was aware, but that didn’t prevent Fred from behaving as if Maggie were already his own personal property. So when he’d come upon her and Nicholas in Burton Wood earlier that day, laughing gaily as they whirled about the clearing in each other’s arms, Fred had seen red.
Maggie hadn’t helped matters. At the best of times she was an impudent minx, and at the worst, a veritable hellion. Raised by Squire Honeywell as if she were his son and heir instead of his gently bred only daughter, she could outride, outhunt, and outshoot most of the young men in the county. Her temper was legendary and she’d learned at her volatile sire’s knee that a profusion of oaths and various threats of violence were the means of solving most any problem.
“Nicholas is helping me practice my dancing,” she’d said in that imperious, toplofty way of hers. “So you can bloody well piss off, Fred!”
And then Nicholas sealed his fate.
He burst out