I Adored a Lord:The Prince Catchers By Katharine Ashe
Dedication
For Darlin
Dearest Reader
My first love in fiction is a beautifully written romance. If that romance includes a bit of high adventure, then I am in alt. I also happen to adore mysteries set in country mansions and remote castles, especially murder mysteries. So when Ravenna Caulfield, the free-spirited youngest sister among my Prince Catchers, suggested to me that she was eager for that sort of harrowing fun, I welcomed the opportunity to write it. Packing up my fuzzy sweaters and woolen socks, I headed off to the mountains of France.
France, you say? Why France? Well, I supposed that if Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, a Belgian, could solve mysteries in England, then my English heroine could solve a mystery in France. N’est-ce pas? And I had a hunch that where I was heading I would find the ideal inspiration.
Quel success! Traveling southeast from Paris, I stopped just short of Switzerland in one of the most poetically beautiful regions of a beautiful country: the Franche-Comté. Here the ancient Jura Mountains descend into valleys bathed in sunshine and blanketed with vineyards. In this paradise I sampled morsels of Comte, a delectably mellow hard cheese, washed down with the famous yellow wine of the region. I dipped crusts of crunchy bread into bubbling, steaming fondue pots and savored mouthwatering plum tarts while looking out upon medieval churches and eighteenth-century chateaux. I studied the stairwells, furnishings, bedchambers, parlors, stables, carriage houses, even the plumbing of glorious mansions where princes and princesses once dwelt, and I wandered the manicured parks of these estates in a state of euphoria. In short, I fell in love. It seemed the perfect place for my heroine and hero to fall in love too.
I give you now I Adored a Lord, a house party whodunit wrapped in a tender, passionate romance and set in a sublimely gracious place. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Warmest wishes,
Katharine
Chapter 1
The Fugitive
Ravenna Caulfield’s ruination began with a bird, continued with a pitchfork, and culminated with a corpse wearing a suit of armor. The bird came first, indeed, years before the pitchfork incident and Ravenna’s untimely discovery of the poor soul in steel—though perhaps that discovery was remarkably timely, depending upon one’s opinion of grand matters like Destiny and Love.
Orphaned as an infant and living in a foundling home with her two elder sisters, Ravenna learned steadfast fortitude from Eleanor and indomitable defiance from Arabella. Unfortunately, she never mastered either. So it was that on the day she stole a carrot for the old cart horse, Mr. Bones, and for it earned six hours locked in the attic, when she found the wounded bird tucked in a crevice between two chipped bricks near the window, she did not know to turn her face from it. Its forlorn cheep cheep was more than a softhearted girl could ignore. She went to it, discovered its torn wing, stared into dark eyes just like hers, and vowed in an earnest whisper that she would save it.
For four weeks she scrubbed the sticky refectory floor quicker than all the other girls, poking her fingers with splinters to earn ten precious minutes of liberty as reward. For four weeks her heart beat like a spoon upon a kettle as she snuck away to the attic where she chewed the stale remnants of bread from breakfast and fed them to the bird. For four weeks she collected rainwater from the windowsill in a leaf and watched the tiny creature drink until its cheeps were no longer despondent but gay. For four weeks she coaxed it into her palm and stroked its torn wing until finally it stretched both feathered limbs and made tentative leaps toward the window.
Then one day it was gone. Ravenna stood amidst broken furniture and old storage trunks, and wept.
A short, joyful cheep sounded outside the window. She shoved it open and stared into the eyes of the bird perched on a branch hanging close. It flew into her outstretched palm.
That spring she watched it industriously build a nest in that branch. When it laid eggs she knelt on her small, calloused knees at chapel every morning and prayed for the health of its young that would soon come. To celebrate their hatching she brought the little mother a worm she’d dug up in the cook’s garden, and watched her feed the four chicks. Lost in happiness that day, Ravenna was late to evening prayers. With livid cheeks, the headmistress reprimanded her before the other girls, then she made them all peel turnips until their hands were raw and sent them to bed without supper.
The next morning when Ravenna snuck out of the attic, three of the foundling home’s meanest girls stood at the base of the stairs waiting for her. With arms crossed and lower lips curled, they said only what they always said to her: “Gypsy.” But the following day when Ravenna went into the yard for their half hour of brisk walking, the three girls stood directly beneath the attic window. Before them on the ground were a great big stone and the remnants of a nest of twigs and leaves.
The little bird never returned.
Arabella fought the girls with nails and fists—and won, of course. That night in the cold dormitory, while Eleanor tended to Arabella’s bruises and cuts, she spoke soft words of comfort to Ravenna. But despite her sisters’ help, Ravenna came to the conclusion that some girls were heartless.
After the bird, the battle lines were clearly drawn. The mean girls did all in their power to trip up the sisters before the headmistress, and most of the time they met with success. Eleanor endured their cruelties. Arabella confronted them.
Ravenna escaped. Losing herself on the modest grounds of the foundling home, whether in the cocooning warmth of summertime, the crisp chill of autumn, the peace of winter, or the soft, damp gray of spring, she fashioned a world in which she could not feel the tugs on her braids or the whispers of “Egyptian” which she did not understand. Outside the whitewashed walls of her prison she sang with blackbirds, scouted out fox, nibbled on berries in the briar patch and raw nuts fallen from friendly trees. Mr. Bones was excellent company; he never spit or pinched, and since her skin was quite like the color of his shaggy coat he never commented on it.
When the Reverend Martin Caulfield took her and her sisters away from the foundling home Eleanor said, “He is a good man, Venna. A scholar.” Whatever that was. “It will be different now.”
A man of dust-colored hair and dust-colored garments but a kind face and a quiet voice, Reverend Caulfield brought them to his cottage tucked behind the church in a corner of the small village. Never beating them or making them scrub floors (Taliesin the Gypsy boy did the latter in exchange for lessons), the Reverend taught them to pray, to read, to write, and to listen carefully to his sermons. These lessons proved challenging for Ravenna, especially the last. The cat that the church ladies kept to eat up all the mice would curl into Ravenna’s lap during the service and purr so loudly that they always told her to take it outside. Once freed, she never returned. The cathedral of Nature seemed a more fitting place to worship the Great Creator than inside stone walls anyway.
On her eighth birthday the Reverend took her to the blacksmith’s shop and opened the door of a horse stall, revealing a sleeping dog and, at her belly, a wiggling cluster of furry bodies. All of them save one were liver spotted. The one, black and shaggy as though he had been deposited in the straw by the hand of Methuselah, tilted his head away from his mother’s teat toward her, cracked open his golden eyes, and Ravenna was so filled up that she could not utter even a sigh.