Young Jem, a skinny little version of his father the landlord, soon appeared with a cart drawn by a placid cob, and set about loading the baggage and trunks.
Donna, after a sharp glance at the narrow seat, began to climb into the back. ‘I can sit here on the trunk, my dear.’
‘I shall not hear of it, Donna,’ Antonia protested. ‘You sit up here in the front with Jem. Jem, which way is the Hall on foot?’
‘Over yonder, ma’am. ’Bout a mile as the crow flies.’ He gestured towards the woods.
‘There, just as I thought from looking at the maps.’ She had been studying them since she realised that this was now going to be her home. ‘I will walk there. I have a headache coming on, and it is only a mile, after all,’ she added as Donna still looked unsure.
Antonia followed the cart across the green and past the cottages, pleased to find, after a few yards, the beginning of a footpath heading in the right direction. As she picked up the hem of her skirts and hopped over the frequent muddy patches in her stout boots, Antonia she thought how strange
it felt to be coming back to a home she had no recollection of.
When her mother died her father had embarked on the course of drinking, gambling and philandering which ruined the family fortunes and would soon corrupt her brother. She had no recollection of things being wrong, other than the fact that her mother was gone, there were no more hugs and cuddles and everything seemed empty and cold.
As soon as rumours of her father’s conduct began to reach polite Society, her great aunt, Lady Honoria Granger, had descended and borne her off to Town. From the little Great Aunt had said about the situation she had expected some opposition from her niece’s husband, but Sir Humphrey had been apparently been only too pleased to be spared the trouble of bringing up a daughter.
It had been fortunate that Lady Honoria had been left well-provided for by her late husband and had been able to afford to educate and then bring out Antonia, for Sir Humphrey, with her off his hands, had shown every sign of forgetting he had ever had a daughter.
Antonia stopped every few yards to pick primroses, her headache easing now she was out of that wretched, stuffy, stage coach. She had been right to wear her old gown, she thought, seeing the chalky mud spatters around the hem.
Whilst she had lived with her great aunt, she had wanted for nothing, but as the old lady had finally become frail she had gone to live under her grandson’s roof. Antonia’s cousin, mindful of his own inheritance, had wasted no time in pointing out to her that she could expect no more support from that quarter.
Antonia had been under the misapprehension that she had been living on income from her mother’s legacy to her, but Cousin Hewitt had soon, and with smug satisfaction, put her right. Not only would she now have to manage without Great Aunt Honoria’s beneficence, but he had also made it pretty plain that she and her companion, Miss Donaldson, must find alternative accommodation. Immediately.
The winding path led her to a clearing full of sunlight. Around her the only sounds were bird song and she took off both bonnet and pelisse, sat on a fallen tree and tipped her face up to the warmth, grateful to be in the clear air and out of London. Glad to have stopped traveling.
In the midst of the upheavals of her aunt’s infirmity and removal, the death in a driving accident of a brother whose face she could not even recall, and the sudden demise of her father from an apoplexy a mere two weeks afterwards, had passed as though they had been no concern of hers. The family solicitor had dealt with everything. After a precarious half-year in lodgings whilst the lawyer sold all he could find to settle Sir Humphrey’s debts, Antonia had finally received word that only the house and land remained. There were no male heirs that anyone could trace, so this meagre inheritance all came to her.
She was just reflecting, and not for the first time, on how fortunate she was that Donna had offered to accompany her to Rye End Hall, when she heard a boy’s voice raised in a yelp of pain. She ran across the clearing, pushed through a straggle of branches and found herself in the company of two urchins, neither of them a day over ten years of age.
One, a wiry redhead, was disentangling himself from the bramble bush into which he had tripped. His companion, an even grubbier child, was holding four limp-necked, and very dead, pheasants by the feet.
There was a long moment while the children stared at her, round-eyed with terror, then, as she took a step towards them, they dropped the birds and took to their heels.
Well. The local poachers certainly start young hereabouts, Antonia thought, stooping to pick up the still-warm pheasants. No doubt they were encouraged by a lack of keepering, for in the depths of debt Sir Humphrey had apparently discharged all his servants except for a cook and maid of all work. Still, the birds were hers, snared on her own land, and they would at least serve as supper tonight.
‘Caught red-handed,’ a triumphant voice said behind her. Antonia spun round and found herself confronted by two burly individuals in decent homespun, shotguns under their arms and a couple of terriers at their heels. ‘Did you ever see the like, Nat? A female poacher, as I live and breathe. You give us those birds, my pretty, and come along of us quiet-like.’
Chapter Two
Antonia opened her mouth to protest that she had just picked up the birds; then the thought of those two skinny, frightened children, and what would happen to them if these men caught them, kept her silent.
The two keepers advanced towards her, one taking the birds from her limp grasp, the other seizing her roughly by the arm, tearing the old gown even more. At the feel of his calloused fingers on her bare skin Antonia twisted and pulled away.
‘Let me go,’ she demanded.
‘Let you go? Oh dear, no. Not after we’ve caught trespassing, with snared pheasants in your hands.’ He grinned, exposing uneven teeth. ‘It’s your lucky day, my pretty, you won’t have to cool your heels in the village lock-up. Oh, no, our local magistrate is at home, and him being a conscientious Justice of the Peace, he likes to see a poacher whenever we catch one, especially one with his own birds. And he’ll like to see this one, won’t he, Nat?’
Both men eyed Antonia slyly. She was suddenly very aware that she was without bonnet or pelisse, that her old cotton gown clung around her legs and she was quite unchaperoned.
Who could they mean by the local magistrate and his own birds? This was Rye End Hall land, her land, but she sensed that arguing with these two about her identity was likely to be an exercise in humiliation. No, better to go along with it and get out of this wood as quickly as possible. Whoever this magistrate was, at least he would be a gentleman and she could make her explanations to him in decent privacy.
The keeper’s fingers were moving suggestively on her forearm through the tear in her gown. Antonia turned such a look of fury on him that he let go of her elbow, then, recalling himself, seized her painfully by the wrist instead.
The walk back through the woods was mercifully short, but by the time they reached the stable block of a big house she did not recognise Antonia was flushed and breathless, her hair tumbling about her face and her skirts torn and bedraggled.
Her captors marched her through the servants’ quarters, up the backstairs, through a green baize door and into a panelled hallway. A butler, alerted by the commotion, emerged from the dining room to hear the gamekeepers’ explanations. He looked her up and down with utter disdain, before departing to inform his master of the arrival of a felon for his attention.