PROLOGUE

      The Rebels

      As soon as the light began to fade, the mist crept in from the forest that bounded the far end of the great park. It was just as if it had lain hidden there crouched among the densely growing trees until the approach of nightfall sent it moving towards the huge house that dominated a rise in the gently sloping ground—sending long, exploratory grey streamers out at first to curl insidiously around the stone walls; and then, growing bolder, advancing like a gauzy cloud until soon the forest was quite cut off from view, and there was only the grey-white mass pressing against the windowpanes. It almost seemed to be waiting—angry because it could not penetrate stone and glass and wood, but patient, too….

      Mrs. Sitwell hurried to pull the heavy velvet drapes together, shivering as she did so despite a roaring fire in the fireplace.

      “Never did like the country very much! It’s almost like it was too quiet, you know? And then the fogs here—ain’t like the London fogs—at least you can see the street lights shining, all yellow and cheerful-like. But out here—” She lowered her voice as she glanced towards the vast, canopied bed that stood in one corner of the room. “Tell me, Mrs. Parsons, how is it that he—” a jerk of her head “—His Grace, I mean—well, it just don’t seem natural for him to be down there in his study, writing letters, with his own wife dying up here.”

      Mrs. Parsons’s thin lips seemed to disappear into her seamed face as she pursed them. “His Grace has his own ways—and his own reasons. You couldn’t know, of course, you’ve only been here three weeks. But I could tell you—” The woman hesitated for a moment, her fingers tightening over themselves; but then, as the desire to talk to someone after all the lonely months proved too much for her, she burst out, “I could tell you—it’s a great deal stranger, all this, than anyone could guess! And of course I’ve been with the family—His Grace’s family that is—for years. I was here when he brought her here as his bride, and I was still here when he brought her back from the Americas. I could have told, even when I was a mere slip of a girl myself, that there was something wrong….”

      The woman who lay so still in the depths of the big, dark bed heard them whispering by the fire. Over the sound of her own breathing—each breath more difficult to draw than the last—she heard words:

      “Brought her here from Ireland, he did. He was only Lord Leo then, and no one ever dreaming he’d ever come into the title like he did….”

      She was in that half-world that lies between coma and reality, and when she heard the woman say something about Ireland, her mind slipped back easily through time; reliving the beginning was so much more pleasant than waiting for the end. Whirling pictures slid through her mind, some of them all too clear, others seeming to curl and blur about the edges like old letters.

      Ireland, and her girlhood, when no one had called her Lady Margaret or Your Grace. It had been Peggy or Peg then. Pretty Peggy, the young men had named her, bringing blushes to her cheeks. And after all, in spite of what all Irishmen referred to as “the troubles,” life had not been too unpleasant.

      What did anything matter as long as she was young and pretty with all of her life still stretching endlessly and excitingly ahead of her? Even her brother Conal’s frowns and carping didn’t matter too much as long as she could escape from him to go down to the village for her stolen, secret confessions to Father MacManus or to visit some of her father’s old tenants. Things were different since her father, the earl of Morey, had taken sick and finally died—without, thankfully, knowing what Conal had done to keep the lands for himself. Turned Protestant, renouncing his own true faith—how could he?

      “I have to think of myself now—don’t you see that? And of you too, sister, although you do not seem to appreciate that fact. Catholics cannot inherit land. Would you rather see all that is ours and has been ours for generations pass to the English Crown? Someone has to be sensible!”

      And she tried not to dwell on the fact that Conal took to going up to Dublin Castle, the seat of the English Government in Ireland, spending far too much time with the English officers who were their age-old enemies and oppressors. She hated the English! They were cold, cruel and arrogant, and they acted as if they owned even the lush green Irish earth they walked on. Conal’s mother had been English, which perhaps accounted for his predilection for that hated race, but her mother had been French—a pretty, small, dark-haired woman who had always smelled faintly of lavender or verbena water.

      Peggy had been thinking of her mother that afternoon when Conal surprised her crossing the brook barefoot, her faded skirts kilted up around her calves.

      Why couldn’t maman have lived? It was lonely, sometimes , without another woman to talk to, with only the sound of the chill to keep her company at night. If only—

      Conal’s harsh, angry voice had cut rudely across her thoughts then.

      “It seems I must forever be apologizing for my little sister! You see, my lord, she lacks not only discipline but also the care of a gently bred woman to instruct her in the manners and deportment of a lady.”

      And looking up, with her face flushed with embarrassment, she had encountered those pale blue eyes for the first time. Eyes set deeply under blond brows in a face of chiseled perfection that was almost too beautiful to belong to a man.

      “No use trying to run off like some startled wood-nymph, sister. We’ve caught you.”

      The young Englishman’s arm, thrown in comradely fashion about her brother’s broad shoulders, dropped as he stared at her measuringly.

      “Leo, may I present my sister, Lady Margaret Galvan? Lord Leofric Sinclair.”

      Two months later, she and Leo had been married. And within three months, she had left Ireland, never to return to it again.

      Her shallow breathing quickened as the shell of the woman who had once been “Pretty Peggy” moved one thin, bloodless hand as if to ward off memories that now came thick and fast, flooding her tired mind with scenes that, like watercolors, ran one into the other: Conal’s loud, blustering voice, shouting at her, threatening her; the feel of his heavy hands as he beat her into shivering, resigned submission; Leo’s white, soft hands, the heavy rings glinting on long fingers—his