Prologue

      England—1814

      Emma Bancroft was very good at holding up walls. She grew more adept at it every time she went to a party, which was not very often. She was getting a great deal of practice at it tonight.

      She pressed her back against the wall of the village assembly room and sipped at a glass of watery punch as she surveyed the gathering. It was a surprisingly large one considering the chilly, damp night outside. Emma would have thought most people would want to stay sensibly at home by their fires, not get dressed in their muslin and silk finery and go traipsing about in search of dance partners. Yet the long and narrow room was crowded with laughing, chattering groups dressed up in their finery.

      Emma rather wished she were home by the fire. Not that she entirely minded a social evening. People were always so very fascinating. She loved nothing better than to find a superb vantage point by a convenient wall and settle down to listen to conversations. It was such fun to devise her own stories about what those conversations were really about, what secret lives everyone might be living behind their smiles and mundane chatter. It was like a good book.

      But tonight she had left behind an actual good book at home in the library of Barton Park, along with her new puppy, Murray. Recently she had discovered the fascinations of botany, which had quite replaced her previous passions for Elizabethan architecture and the cultivation of tea in India. Emma often found new topics of education that fascinated her, and plants were a new one. Her father’s dusty old library, mostly unexplored since his death so long ago, was full of wonders waiting to be discovered.

      And tonight, with a cold rain blowing against the windows, seemed a perfect one for curling up with a pot of tea and her studies, Murray at her feet. But her sister Jane, usually all too ready for a quiet, solitary evening at home, had insisted they come to the assembly. Jane even brought out some of her fine London gowns for them to wear.

      ‘I am a terrible sister for letting you live here like a hermit, Emma,’ Emma remembered Jane saying as she held up a pale-blue silk gown. ‘You are only sixteen and so pretty. You need to be dancing, and flirting and—well, doing what young, pretty ladies enjoy doing.’

      ‘I enjoy staying here and reading,’ Emma had protested, even as she had to admit the dress was very nice. Definitely prettier than her usual faded muslins, aprons and sturdy boots, though it would never do for digging up botanical specimens. Jane even let her wear their mother’s pearl pendant tonight. But she could still be reading at home.

      Or hunting for the lost, legendary Barton Park treasure, as their father had spent his life doing. But Jane didn’t have to know about that. Her sister had too many other worries.

      ‘I know you enjoy it, and that is the problem,’ Jane had said, as she searched for a needle and thread to take the dress in. ‘But you are growing up. We can’t go on as we have here at Barton Park for ever.’

      ‘Why not?’ Emma argued. ‘I love it here, just the two of us in our family home. We can do as we please here, and not worry about...’

      About horrid schools, where stuck-up girls laughed and gossiped, and the dance master grabbed at Emma in the corridor. Where she had felt so, so alone. She was sent there when their mother died and Jane married the Earl of Ramsay, Hayden. Emma had never wanted her sweet sister to know what happened there. She never wanted anyone to know. Especially not about her foolish feelings for the handsome dance teacher, that vile man who had taken advantage of her girlish feelings to kiss her in the dark—and tried so much more before Emma could get away. He had quite put her off men for ever.

      Emma saw the flash of worry in Jane’s hazel eyes before she bent her head over the needle and Emma took her other hand with a quick smile.

      ‘Of course we must have a night out, Jane, you are quite right,’ she’d said, making herself laugh. ‘You must be so bored here with just me and my books after your grand London life. We shall go to the assembly and have fun.’

      Jane laughed, too, but Emma heard the sadness in it. The sadness had lingered ever since Jane brought Emma back to Barton Park almost three years before, when Jane’s husband, the earl, hadn’t appeared in many months. Emma didn’t know what had happened between them in London and she didn’t want to pry, but nor did she want to add to her sister’s worry.

      ‘My London life was not all that grand,’ Jane said, ‘and I am not sorry it’s behind me. But soon it will be your time to go out in the world, Emma. The village doesn’t have a wide society, true,