Chapter 5: The Earl at the Door

Elowen Tarn spent the morning in the attic, behind a trunk, eating a stranger's biscuits.

They were good biscuits, dry and buttery, from a tin with a Treasury crest on the lid.

She had found the tin on the auditor's bed when she crept up to hide.

The attic had one window under the roof's slope.

From it she could see the lane, the frozen pond and the long line of the east drive going up to Voltraine Hall.

At ten o'clock a coach came down the drive.

It was a black coach with a gilded crest she knew, and it stopped at the dower house gate.

She stopped chewing.

The Earl of Wescote climbed out, slowly, because he was sixty-one and the step was high.

Two men in grey followed him, and then the coachman, with a coil of rope over his shoulder.

Elowen put the biscuit down.

She had been handed to a tutor, a dancing master, a physician, and now an Earl, and nobody had asked her once.

Her hands were shaking so hard that the tin rattled.

She pressed it against her stomach to quiet it.

Below, a door opened.

She crept to the stair and lay flat on the boards to look through the gap.

The front door of the dower house stood wide, and Calista was in it.

She wore her dove-grey wool and her keys, and she held a fire poker in her right hand.

"My lord," Calista said. "You are standing on my gravel."

"Lady Calista," said the Earl, with his hat in his hand and his teeth very white. "I have come for my bride."

"I know of no bride in this house."

"Elowen Tarn was promised to me by her guardian. The paper is signed."

"Which guardian?" said Calista.

"The Marquis."

"Then you had better go back to the Marquis, because the girl is not in my house."

The Earl smiled thinly.

"I think she is."

He nodded to the two men, and they started up the path.

Calista did not move.

But from the lane behind the gate came the sound of boots.

Elowen pressed her face to the crack.

The whole village of Larkmoor was coming up the road.

There was the blacksmith with his hammer.

The miller's wife with her sleeves rolled, and thirty mill hands in a ragged line, all of them in their work clothes.

They did not say anything.

They stood in the lane and crossed their arms.

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