Cherrybrook Rose Read Online Free Page A

radiate from the outer corners of his clear hazel eyes, so she imagined he could be no more than thirty. It was difficult to tell exactly, for though his cap had been knocked from his head, his hair had been clipped so closely the scissors had grazed his scalp in places, but a cap of light down was just visible here and there. A trickle of blood was curling down his chin from his torn lip, but the pained shadow of a smile twitched at his mouth and his gaze held hers until the other guard cuffed him about the ear and forced him to stumble onwards.
    Rose stood and watched as the rest of the work party was marched past, a strange knot frozen solid in her chest as she fought her way back to reality. A convict. Guilty of some heinous crime. Ah, well . . . He must deserve to be incarcerated in Dartmoor’s infamous gaol. Put to some of the most gruelling toil known to man, treated like the scum of the earth. The quarry was probably the most feared and hated of prison work. Not a moment’s rest was allowed from the strenuous, crushing labour. Serious accidents were frequent, no care given to the prisoners’ safety – except if Warder Cartwright was on duty, for he could not find it in his Christian soul to allow even a convicted felon to be maimed if he could help it. Others were less mindful and as well as paying no heed to other dangers in the quarry would order convicts to pick out by hand any unexploded charges. It was not uncommon for a hapless villain to be blinded or have his hand blown away when the powder went off belatedly.
    A whimper scraped from Rose’s lungs. And she somehow prayed that the prisoner – whoever he was, but who had possibly saved Jacob’s life – never suffered such a tragedy.
    She buried the sickening thought somewhere deep in the darkest recesses of her passionate young mind, and retrieving her hat from amongst the grass at the side of the track, scrambled back up the slope to where Molly was waiting.

Two
    F or once, Rose Maddiford held in check the colossal steed on whose back she rode. It was no mean feat, for the creature was strong and possessed a will of iron. But so did Rose. She kept the reins short in her gloved hands and low down on either side of the gleaming black neck, for she refused to use what she considered the cruel martingale the previous owner had admitted was the only way he could control the beast. She could feel the power now in Gospel’s clenched haunches, and she only needed to let her concentration slip for a second before the horse started to pick up its front legs and dance sideways in an effort to escape from Rose’s tight constraint. But Rose was not in the mood for their usual mad gallop as they left Princetown behind.
    The incident by the quarry tunnel had thrown her senses into some strange confusion. Molly had been like a quivering jelly, wanting to return home at once. It had taken every ounce of Rose’s ingenuity to persuade her to complete what was known as the ‘triangle’, down to the small settlement at Rundlestone, along a stretch of the main highway that cut right across Dartmoor from east to west and finally back up to the prison village via Two Bridges Road, the very same Gospel’s hooves were treading now in the opposite direction. Think how your mother will worry if you tell her your father nearly had his head split open by a convict, Rose had argued. Of course,
she
had been upset, too, for she was fond of Mr Cartwright, but there was something else that had gripped her heart with a violence that astounded her. The unmerited beating the prisoner had received at the hands – or more precisely, the
feet
– of the guards had sickened her, but even more than that, when the fellow had looked straight into her eyes, she had felt a curious and unwanted pull on her innermost feelings. He was a convicted criminal, guilty of some appalling act to warrant incarceration in the dreaded Dartmoor gaol, and yet