Category:

PROLOGUE

1785

It was a moment Matthew Taylor knew he would never forget. A fanciful thought, perhaps, when he was eighteen years old and all of life and life's experiences stretched ahead of him. Or so it was said, most notably by his parents, as though his childhood and boyhood were of no consequence.

He knew, though, that he would always remember. He stood watching Clarissa Greenfield, drinking in the sight of her, willing the present moment not to end, hoping she would not move or speak again for a while.

She was leaning back against a tall tree, her arms slightly behind her on either side, her palms pressed to the trunk. A breeze he could scarcely feel fluttered the sides of her long, full skirt and her dark hair, which she had shaken loose when she'd dropped her straw hat to the ground. She was achingly pretty, with all the freshness of youth and the innate warmth and charm that were an essential part of her.

She was seventeen years old.

Their families were neighbors. She had been his closest friend for most of their lives, though they could not be more different in nature and temperament if they tried. She was even-tempered, devoted to her parents, and obedient to them and her governess. She wanted to be the sort of young lady they wished her to be. They loved her, after all. She had a deep affection too for her brother, a good-natured lad who was five years younger than she. It seemed to Matthew that there was never discord within the Greenfield family.

He, on the other hand, was a misfit within his family. He had tried to love his parents and Reginald, his brother, who was ten years his senior. In his more generous moments he admitted they had probably tried to love him too. It just had not worked. His mother and father had very rigid ideas about the sort of person a second son ought to be if he was to expect a prosperous and respectable future. His father, though a gentleman of property, did not have a large fortune. Everything he did possess would pass to Reginald upon his death, just as his father's property had passed to him while his younger two brothers had forged successful careers, the elder as a diplomat, the younger as a solicitor. Matthew had not met either uncle or their wives and children, his cousins. His uncles wrote to his father but never came home for a visit. His father used them as examples of what Matthew must aspire to be. He must be educated to enter one of the professions suited to his birth.

The whole of his boyhood was designed to prepare him for that future. Any idle activity, any behavior that ran counter to the plan, was firmly discouraged. It seemed to Matthew, looking back from the age of eighteen, that he had never been allowed to be simply a boy, exploring his world and perhaps finding enjoyment in it.

He had decided early in his life that he could not always, or even often, conform to the sober, joyless expectations of his parents. He gave up even trying after repeatedly being scolded and punished for behavior that came naturally to him—falling into streams, for example, while trying to cross them on mossy stones he had been warned were unsafe; whittling away at pieces of wood with a knife he was not supposed to have and being careless about clearing away every last scrap of shavings that gathered about him on furniture and floor; being late home when visitors were expected for afternoon tea—late and grubby with dust and mud and sweat from head to foot. The list went on and on. He spent more time in his room with only dry bread, stale water, and a Bible for company and sustenance than he did anywhere else, he sometimes thought.

Even his grandmother—his mother's mother, who lived on the estate adjoining theirs and next door but one to the Greenfields—upon whom he called quite frequently as a young child, told him one day that unless his behavior at his own home improved, he would no longer be welcome in hers. He had never again gone there voluntarily.

Matthew gave up trying. He developed into a moody, rebellious boy, until the worst thing of all happened. His brother, the beloved Reggie of his early years, began to punish him for bad behavior by refusing to do things with him such as fishing in the stream or flying a kite in the meadow or going to the village shop for the rare treat of buying sweetmeats. When Matthew had rebelled even more in protest, Reggie had washed his hands of him and become Reginald ever after. Their mother sometimes wept and complained that she did not know what she had done to deserve such a disobedient, ungrateful child. And the more his father tried to insist that Matthew toe the line for his own good, the more Matthew deliberately did just the opposite.