Chapter One

      Arabella couldn’t say if it was the children crying in the room next to hers that woke her, the hard-edged rain pelting the windowpanes that sounded like stones, or a shutter banging against a wall in the far reaches of the house.

      Opening her eyes, she listened to the wind blowing and moaning like a tortured soul over the land. She prayed the shutter wouldn’t blow off. And then she realised what it was that had disturbed her—the rhythmic beat of horses’ hooves approaching the house.

      Soldiers. Who else could it be?

      Closing her eyes, with foreboding in her heart she prayed they weren’t about to have a repeat of what had happened in the past, when Parliamentary soldiers had sacked the house.

      ‘Are the vultures about to gather again?’ she muttered, knowing she should pray hard and fast that it was not so, but she was too weary to do what had proved useless in the past. With her heart racing and shivering with cold, she got out of bed and went to the window and looked out. Rain was falling hard, but the moon between the swirling clouds was full and bright, illuminating the sturdy walls of this fourteenth-century manor house in the county of Gloucestershire. Four riders, Royalist soldiers—the wide-brimmed hats with swirling plumes worn by two of the men indicating this—were riding through the gatehouse. They halted in the courtyard, but for King or Parliament it made little difference. They would want feeding and there was little food at Bircot Hall to be had. The soldiers were dismounting, staring about them with a confident air.

      Pulling on her dress of deep blue which she had shed earlier, one of the few dresses left to her after the Roundheads’ purge of the house in search of anything worth stealing, she heard a loud persistent hammering on the stout oak doors. Wind shook the house as she hurried from her room and the darkness seemed charged with energy. Every fibre of her being was on alert. She had a throbbing in the base of her skull all the while, for there is nothing as contagious as panic.

      The atmosphere of acute anxiety was rife when she arrived in the hall, with the few servants—Sam Harding, his wife, Bertha, and their son, Tom, who remained loyal—and family standing close together, all with strained eyes and drawn faces, not knowing what to expect. Even Alice’s children, aware of the tension, were fretful and clinging to their mother’s skirts.

      Arabella looked at them, at Alice, her sister, aged beyond her thirty years by the trials and tribulations the Civil War had wrought. In the absence of Robert, Alice’s husband, who had fought for the King and was now in exile in France, Alice had withstood the invasion of the Parliamentarians into her home and shown herself capable of gallantry at least equal to that of her husband. But she was weary with all that had befallen them and trying to keep her children fed.

      Then there was Margaret, even tempered, calm and rational. She was Alice’s twenty-year-old sister-in-law. Holding deeply religious convictions, Margaret had no desire to complicate her life with a husband and children, preferring to devote herself to her family and to prayer. It would take more than the Civil War to break Margaret’s composure and her faith in God. But Alice had told Arabella that she was not totally convinced by her sister-in-law’s convictions. Margaret had led a sheltered