Lord Devere's Ward

Badham Abbey, Wiltshire, England

January, 1820

“God, help me!”

Kate Scoville kicked and flailed her feet, struggling to grip the tower wall with her oversized boots. She whispered a hasty prayer in the chance that the Almighty paid attention to her small corner of His world. Wearing clumsy, borrowed gloves, she grasped the rope tied to the attic window and pushed her boots against the side of the tower, seeking purchase on the wall.

At last, her toes found a mortared joint between two massive blocks of stone. She breathed deeply until her racing pulse steadied. The chill air knifed her lungs. She could see her breath, small puffy clouds, when she exhaled.

She looked down and gulped. Three far stories below her, the slate roof of the abbey gleamed, pale and frosty in the moonlight.

She tried not to utter curses damning her wretched uncle, whose treachery had brought her to such desperate straits. First he’d torn her away from her beloved home in Somerset. Then he’d nagged her to marry his beef-witted son, Osborn, until she thought he’d drive her quite out of her mind. Locking her in an icy tower attic until she cooperated had been the proverbial last straw.

She inched her boots down the tower wall. The short sword she wore on her belt beat against her side with every halting step as her cape flapped around her knees. She finally attained her immediate goal: the abbey’s second-story roof. Still clasping the rope, she crept across the slippery slates. If she reached the edge of the roof without mishap, she’d climb down to the ground by way of a convenient vine or tree.

At the end of the rope, she released it with a shaky, nervous hand. A few steps later, her feet flew out from under her. Yelping, she fell with a bump to slide down the pitched roof, scrabbling for a hold.

Scant feet from the brink, she plunged into a black gap. Her cape caught on the rough edges and timbers of the roof, breaking her fall. Despite her clinging garb, she plummeted through the hole, too shocked and frightened to scream.

“Oof!” She landed on a wooden floor, which emitted a massive boom as she hit. Her body clenched, and she whimpered in mingled fear and pain, realizing she could have been badly hurt had she fallen on her sword. She rubbed her left side through her doublet. She’d be bruised the next day, but didn’t have time to sit and bemoan her aches and pains.

Heat from her exertions flooded her body. She controlled her trembling, stood, and then looked about, recognizing the ballroom on the abbey’s second floor. She adjusted her borrowed clothing, the costume of a Tudor boy she’d found in the attic. She’d donned it knowing that a doublet, hose, boots, and cape were more practical garb for escaping from a locked tower room than her usual bulky gown and soft shoes.

She prayed that no one had been awakened by her noisy advent into the cavernous ballroom. The entire household should have been roused by the din she’d made. Perhaps God did listen.

Kate smoothed her hair with a quivering hand whilst considering her situation. She was tired, sore, and frightened, but she was now only one floor away from freedom. She could leave through any of the large windows lining the ballroom to climb down to the ground. She wasn’t sufficiently bold to use the front door.

She twisted the latch of the nearest window, pushing it outward. The hinges squealed, an unnerving sound which kicked up her heartbeat to a gallop.

But still, no one was roused. No one raised an alarm. With relief, she remembered the sordid habits of her uncle and his whelp. Herbert and Osborn were undoubtedly sleeping off last night’s libations. The servants, as undisciplined as their masters, were doubtless in no better condition.

How could her grandfather have made such a foolish choice? She’d lived with him since the deaths of her parents, and surely he must have been aware of Herbert’s predilections. The odd arrangement her grandfather had created in his Will left her in her uncle’s custody until her coming-out, but had made her the ward of an Earl in faraway London, an older fellow she’d met but once. “Grandfather must have gone dotty at the end,” she muttered.

She cast aside her fruitless reflections. Stepping through the open window to the terrace outside, she flipped a leg over the balustrade near a pillar, which was covered by a sturdy ivy vine. Digging a boot between its twining, woody stems, she used it as her ladder to reach the snowy ground below.

She dashed over the snow without a backward look, hoping that no one from the house observed her dark shape stumbling across the bright, white field. The front gate was locked, but she found a spot where the current Earl had neglected the upkeep of the walls. She grinned when she saw the tumbledown stones, which proved to be an easy climb.

She headed for the tollgate near Derbeck. All coaches and stages traveling west to Bath or east to London would stop there.

But where would she go?