Orphans from the Storm: Bride at Bellfield Mill / A Family for Hawthorn Farm / Tilly of Tap House

And her husband. Poor Milo. He had fought so hard to live. She had seen how much he wanted to do so from the look in his eyes when he had asked her to place the baby in his arms one time. Tears stung her eyes, but she wiped them away. She was here in Rawlesden now, where Milo had wanted her to be.

A dab of salt on her finger, brushed round her mouth and then rinsed away, would have to serve to clean her teeth for tonight, and she summoned the courage to push her sad thoughts to one side. She must ask Mr Gledhill if he would authorise an advance on her wages, she decided, so that she could buy a few small personal necessities.

She was so tired that her eyes were closing as soon as she lay down on the settle beneath the blankets she had found.

Outside the snow whirled and fell in the biting cold, obliterating the landscape in deep drifts.

Marianne woke abruptly out of the dream she had been having. Her body felt warm but her mind was not at rest. She thought about the man upstairs and the ominous heat she had felt round his wound. Pushing back the blankets, she swung her feet to the floor.

It was not her responsibility to worry about him, but somehow she could not help but do so.

That flushed and discoloured wound and what it might portend was preying on her mind.

He would be sleeping, of course, she told herself as she lit a lantern, her toes curling in protest against the cold of the stone floor. And no doubt he would be angry with her if she woke him. But she knew that she would not rest until she had done as her aunt’s training was urging her and checked the wound, in case her fears weren’t merely in her imagination.

The lantern light cast moving shadows on the stair wall, elongating her own petite frame, so that it almost seemed to Marianne that as she climbed the stairs others climbed them with her.

In turn, that led her to think of the other women who had climbed these stairs before her, like the master’s neglected wife, her heart perhaps even more heavy than her body as she fought against her too-early labour pains.

And what of the wife’s niece? Had she too climbed these stairs in dread?

This house had known so much unhappiness and so much death. It needed the laughter of happy young voices to drive away its sadness.

The lantern highlighted darker patches on the landing wallpaper she had not noticed before, where a trio of paintings must have once hung. The chill of the unheated space drove Marianne on until she reached the master’s bedroom. She paused before turning the handle and opening the door.

A fire still burned in the grate, but surely it wasn’t just its glow that was responsible for the flush burning on the face of the man asleep in the bed. His breathing was rapid and unsteady, his body jerking in small spasms, as though even in his sleep he was in pain. His face was turned towards the window. On the table beside the bed she could see the bottle of brandy and an empty glass.

Marianne shivered. Were her worst fears to be realised? Putting down the lantern, she walked over to the bed. Leaning down, she placed her hand against its occupant’s forehead and then snatched it back again as she felt its heat, knowing that she would have to check his wound. She could smell the brandy he had drunk, no doubt to help him sleep and to dull the pain.

If the feverish heat of his face was anything to go by then his injury had indeed turned putrid. As she went to the other side of the bed Marianne prayed that she would not see on his thigh the tell-tale red line her aunt had warned her meant that the poison was spreading.

She prayed also that the brandy he had drunk would keep him asleep, because this time she intended to have her way and make sure that some cleansing honey was applied to his wound.

He winced when she removed the bedcovers, his face contorting in a spasm of pain, but he did not wake. In the light of the lantern Marianne could see what she had hoped she might not. His thigh was swollen, its flesh drawn tight and shiny, but when she looked closer she saw thankfully there was no red line. It smelled of heat and blood, but not of putrescence.

She worked as quickly as she could, using boiled and cooled water to draw the heat from the wound, and then covering the site with honey before rebandaging it.

She had worked so intently and so swiftly that she was slightly out of breath, her own flesh warm from her exertion.

Thankfully, through all that she had had to do, the Master of Bellfield had never once opened his eyes, although she had heard him groan on several occasions. Now, with her task completed, she replaced the covers and then, like any good nurse, went round the bed to its head, so that she might straighten the pillows and draw the sheet up to cover at least some of that disturbing breadth of male chest.

Busy at her task, she leaned over her patient and then froze in shock as suddenly his eyes opened and his hand curled tightly into her hair as it lay against his chest.

‘Why do you come here to torture me like this?’ he demanded thickly. ‘Why cannot you leave me be?’

Surely he could not really be meaning to speak so to her?

Marianne guessed that he must be lost in some memory from his past, of another woman. Why should that knowledge bring her such a sharp pain?

‘Why?’ he repeated, plainly expecting her to answer him.

‘I…I’m sorry,’ Marianne apologised. ‘I had no choice. It had to be done.’

‘How sweetly you take the words from my mouth, and how fiercely I long to take the breath from yours.’

He could not possibly mean such words for her. He might be looking at her, but surely either the pain or the brandy must have turned his brain and he was confusing her with someone else. His ward, perhaps, his wife’s niece, the beautiful young girl who had loved his stepson and who some said the master had lusted after so dreadfully that he had pursued her to her death?

Marianne tried to pull away, but it was too late. He was too strong for her. Somehow he had managed to raise himself on his pillows.

Marianne closed her eyes on a small sob as his hands slid into her hair, constraining her whilst he kissed her as a man should surely kiss no woman but his wife.

Shockwaves of feeling rushed through her body, stiffening it to outrage, and then softening it to something she did not know or want to know—something yielding and wanton and oh, so pleasurable that she wanted to cast herself upon its waters and let it take her where it willed, like a small craft being guided by the hands of another and taken with the current into the secret shadows.

She felt his hand move, sliding down her bare shoulder to the strap of her chemise, urging it downwards, the intensity of his kiss mirroring the intensity of his desire to expose the female flesh of her breasts. She was surrounded, possessed by his heat and his urgency. She could feel it in his kiss and in his touch, and she shuddered to see the strong male hand covering the pale flesh of her breast whilst he kissed her throat and then her shoulder.

Her knees buckled beneath her and she fell against him, bare flesh against bare flesh. What she was permitting was wrong, a sin, and yet…

‘You have possessed me—do you know that?’ His words were slurred and thick, the cry of a man in torment as he pressed fierce kisses against her skin.

She must stop this. She raised her hand to push him away, and then felt beneath it the thick softness of his hair. Her palm rested against his head, holding him to her as she leaned over him. This was so wrong—and yet hadn’t she known deep down inside herself that she was drawn to this darkness and to him? Her chest rose with the passion of her thoughts and her breathing.

‘Why do you do this to me?’ His angry cry filled the room. He turned from her as though in revulsion, and then cried out again, this time in pain, as he moved his injured leg while reaching for the brandy.

She tried to stop him but it was too late. He had raised the bottle to his lips to take a deep draught from it before collapsing back against the pillows, his eyes closing and his grip on the bottle relaxing, enabling Marianne to remove it from his hold and then straighten her chemise.