Page 1 of Hold Me Fast
Prologue
1813, Cornwall
“It will notbe for long,” Tamsyn Roskilly told her beloved. “Mother says I must go, and I can come back when I have learned what his lordship can teach me.”
Mother was afraid for her position, and rightly so. Sir Carlyon Trethewey had threatened to dismiss her and to throw her and her daughter off the estate if Tamsyn continued, as he put it, “to sniff around my son.”
“I know.” Jowan Trethewey took her hand in his own. Her right hand. The one that wore the ring he had given Tamsyn on their sixteenth birthday. The ring she had given him glinted on his own right hand. “They won’t part us for long,” Jowan promised. “I can bring Father around, or if I cannot, we can run away to be married. I’m his only heir. He will have to forgive me once it is done.”
He pressed his lips to her right hand. “I cannot wait to give you a ring for the other hand.”
Tamsyn shook her head. The chances of Sir Carlyon changing his mind were somewhere on the same level as the moon falling or the sea turning sweet. Or her mother putting Tamsyn’s wants and desires ahead of her own. “When we are twenty-one, we can do as we please,” she commented.
It didn’t comfort her. Their twenty-first birthday was nearly five long years away. An eternity.
“I will miss you so much,” Jowan told her, and pulled her into his arms, ignoring the Earl of Coombe, who stood tapping an impatient foot beside his carriage, and the man’s driver, footmen, and outriders.
“I will write to you every day, and I will send the letter every week,” Tamsyn promised, burrowing into his chest, taking a deep breath of the unique smell that said ‘Jowan’ to her. She couldn’t speak about missing him, or she would cry. “Lord Coombe says he will frank my letters.”
“I will do the same,” he promised, dropping a kiss on her hair.
“I hate to break up this touching scene,” Lord Coombe drawled, “but we really must get on the road.”
Jowan cast him a glance seething with anger and impatience. Jowan didn’t trust the earl and had made such a fuss about Tamsyn going with him that Sir Carlyon had paid Dorwa from the village to go with Tamsyn as her maid. Just for a few weeks, until Lord Coombe could hire her a London girl because Tamsyn was going to be a singer in far-off London and would need a maid who understood the demands of the stage.
“I have to go,” she whispered to Jowan. Part of her wanted to go. To be able to make her living with her music. To be away from her mother and her mother’s constant criticism. To be safe from Sir Carlyon and his threats towards her and her mother. To be valued for her singing and her beauty, the very things that drew her mother’s anger and Sir Carlyon’s scorn.
“I know,” Jowan said. He set her free from his arms with the greatest of reluctance, and she had to fight not to clutch at him again. The larger part of her didn’t want to go. The part that had belonged to Jowan since she was five years of age and had first come to Inneford House, to be scowled at by the baronet and welcomed by his son.
She took a step back and then another and another. Jowan stood, his gaze a caress and a farewell. Lord Coombe took her by the shoulders and turned her to face the carriage and she climbed aboard.
She took one last glance before sitting down next to Dorwa, in the backward-facing seats.
“You will soon forget this godforsaken place,” Lord Coombe predicted, as he, too, sat down, spreading his knees and resting his hands on the seat so he spread across the whole of his side of the carriage. “You will find there is too much to do for homesickness.”
Dorwa had her ticket to get back home safe in her bag. Tamsyn had one, too, but no one knew about it except her and Jowan. Jowan said if things were not as Lord Coombe promised, she was to write to let him know. He would meet her in Falmouth, and they would catch a boat to Scotland. She gave Lord Coombe a non-committal nod. If it proved to be unbearable, she would simply come home, for wherever Jowan was, that would always be home.
Chapter One
1820, seven years later, Inneford House, Cornwall
Jowan’s brother Branwas already at the table when he came down for breakfast. A newspaper sat at Jowan’s place. It had been folded open to one of the center pages, and an article had been circled with a heavy pencil line.
Jowan met Bran’s eyes. “Something you wanted me to see?”
“Something I thought you would want to see,” Bran replied. He was using his English voice this morning, Jowan noted. Branoc Hughes was a chameleon, able to mingle with country-folk and quality alike.
The day before, when they had been out with the shearers wrangling sheep, his speech had been laced with Cornish words and spoken in the West-country lilt he’d learned from his mother’s people, who were fisher-folk.
Their father had insisted that, if the bastard son who suddenly appeared on his doorstep was going to stay, he would at least learn to talk like a civilized being. Bran had never told him his mother had arranged for him to be tutored by a vicar who was the son of a duke and could speak even more like the loftiest of the upper classes than Sir Carlyon himself. Bran was always careful to speak broadly when their father was about, and Jowan was certainly not going to let the man in on the joke.
Jowan poured himself a cup of strong black tea and added milk and sugar before taking his place at the table and picking up the newspaper. He lifted his cup to his mouth as he began to read and a moment later his cup dropped from suddenly nerveless hands. The oath with which he colored the air had as much to do with what he read as with the hot liquid soaking through his trousers.
Without comment, Bran handed Jowan a napkin, and he blotted absently at the mess while rereading the article.
“Tamsyn is back in England,” he said, more to himself than to his brother, testing the words out loud as if hearing them would make them truer. She was still separated from him, as much by her chosen lifestyle as by three hundred and fifty miles and seven years. But she was, at least, in the same country.
“You should go to London,” Bran said. “Find out why she stopped writing. Find out why she didn’t come home.”
