“I’m off,” Lizzie said. “That storm’ll be here in a few minutes. Hope I make it home without getting drownded. Thanks again, Miss Maddy. Dunno what I would’a done without you and your lessons. Uncle Bill is grateful an’ all.” She winked. “I’m the worst dairymaid he’s ever had, but you can’t sack family, can you? He reckons if you can teach me enough to get me off his hands, he’ll keep you in milk and butter and cream and cheese for the rest of your life.”
Maddy laughed. “I might just hold him to that. And don’t call me Miss M—” But Lizzie was already running along the lane.
Maddy shook her head. She’d lost track of the number of times she’d told Lizzie to call her Maddy, but Lizzie never would, even though they were the same age, twenty-two.
You’re a lady born, and I’m just an ignorant farm girl. Besides, if I’m going to be a lady’s maid, I’d best get in the habit of showin’ respect,Lizzie would say.
Maddy shivered. The storm was closing in fast and she had seedlings to save.
In the last few days, the weather had suddenly turned freezing. Spring buds had frozen on the branch, early daffodils had turned to ice, and worst of all, the bitter frosts had killed off more than a third of her tender spring greens.
She fetched some sacking from beside the woodpile at the back door and began covering her precious seedlings, laying it over a trellis of support sticks, protecting the tender shoots beneath.
She’d planted her first seeds at the age of nine. It was a delightful novelty then, but those lettuces, nourished to maturity and presented with pride to her grandmother, taught her enough to make the difference between starvation and survival.
Maddy didn’t dream about vegetables then. It was all handsome princes and balls and pretty dresses and love . . .
Slowly the handsome princes of her dreams had become merely handsome gentlemen, and balls, well, they were impossible, too, for even if some unknown person sent her an invitation, she didn’t have a pretty dress and there was no money for anything new.
These days she would settle for a decent man. A farmer or a tradesman, it didn’t matter, as long as she could like and respect him, and he respect her. She wasn’t a child any longer and life was not the stuff of dreams, but a constant battle.
She straightened, arching her back as she checked the protection over the tender plants. The seedlings would survive. They had to. Her little family depended on it. They would survive, too. It was just a matter of working hard and being frugal.
And luck. She looked at the dark, seething clouds.
The thunder of hooves told her the horseman was right outside her cottage. He was indeed a gentleman. Everything about him declared it, from his magnificent thoroughbred to his elegant, many-caped buff greatcoat, high boots, and stylish beaver hat. He rode easily, as if born to a horse.
Who was he visiting? Sir Jasper Brownrigg, who owned Whitethorn Manor, had died three months ago, and apart from the vicar, the only other gentlemen in the district was the squire, and he was more gentlemanlike than gentleman born—a fine distinction, but one she knew her father would have insisted on. A frightful snob, her late papa.
And look where your airs and graces have led us, Papa,she mused bitterly.To a situation where a few old sacks, some seedlings, and a milkmaid with ambition are all that stand between your children and hunger.
And between Maddy and Fyfield Place.
The horse took a wide ditch in its stride, then headed for the long, low, drystone wall. The wall stretched for miles, rising and falling with the rise and dip of the land, an unbroken gray border snaking across the landscape.
The estate maintenance had grown slack since Sir Jasper Brownrigg had grown old and infirm, and stones had been knocked off and not replaced. The horseman veered slightly, angling his horse toward a section of the wall where some of the coping stones had been knocked off. At first glance, it looked like the perfect place to jump, but—
“No, not there!” she shouted. “The boys’ mud slide—”
Her words were blown away by the wind.
Under her horrified gaze, the horse hit the slick surface of the mud slide just as its powerful hindquarters muscles bunched to make the leap over the wall.
It skidded. Its hooves scrabbled frantically for purchase, and failed. The horse fell. Its rider flew through the air and smashed into the wall.
In the sudden shocked silence that followed, the world seemed to stand still. Then the horse scrambled to its feet, snorted, shook itself, and trotted away, seemingly unhurt.
The dark huddle at the foot of the wall didn’t move.
Maddy was off and running before she knew it, wrenching open the stiff old gate with the ease of urgency.
The stranger lay in the mud, half curled against the hard stone surface of the wall. His head was at an awkward angle. So was one leg. He lay ominously still.
Maddy slipped two fingers inside the collar of his coat, between the fine fabric of his shirt and his warm skin. She closed her eyes, concentrating every sense on the tip of those two fingers.
Nothing. No beat, no movement.
She recalled her flippant comment about the horseman of the apocalypse.
