Mary Jo Putney Read Online Free Page B

herself sit down again in her Windsor chair by the fire. Closing her eyes and relaxing, she tried to analyze what she felt, patiently sorting out the threads of concern for Edith and Geoffrey and the other minor worries of daily life. What was left was a hazy, unfamiliar perception that she was hard-pressed to name. It wasn't danger that approached; she was sure nothing threatened her small household.
    But she felt in her bones that something, or someone, was coming with the storm. Diana's fingers tightened around each other, and she forced herself once more to relax. In a flash of intuition she realized that what approached was something she both feared and welcomed: change.
    * * *
    Madeline Gainford had been born and bred here on the rooftop of England, but she'd forgotten how bitterly the wind blew. She had been only seventeen when she left, and her blood had pulsed with the fires of youth.
    Now she was past forty, and when the carter had set her down on the small village common of Cleveden, her home village looked strange to her. Yet Cleveden itself had changed very little. The differences were all in her.
    The cart had been nearly full and the driver allowed her to bring only the small soft bag now slung over her shoulder. She had left her trunk at an inn in Leyburn, not wanting to wait for different transport because the coming storm might have trapped her for days among strangers. And more than anything else on earth, Madeline had wanted to die among friends.
    She pulled her fur-lined cloak tightly around her as if she could blot out the aching unpleasantness of the interview she had just had with her widowed sister. They had been friends once, until Madeline had left home in disgrace. The occasional letters the two women exchanged had been terse and to the point, but Madeline thought she had sent back enough money over the years to buy a welcome back into her family home. Isabel had been widowed early, and had it not been for the funds Madeline sent, it would have been hard times for her and her four children.
    When Isabel opened the door, her body had stiffened at the sight of her younger sister, her expression of surprise quickly followed by anger and disgust. In a few vicious sentences, Isabel Wolfe had made it clear that while she had graciously accepted her sister's conscience money, she would not let her children be corrupted by having a whore under her own roof.
    Her last bitter words still rang in Madeline's ears: You made your own bed, and a whole legion of men have lain in it.
    Madeline would not have thought words could hurt so much, but then, she had never been called a whore by her own sister. Only now that the hope was gone did she realize how much she had counted on finding refuge here.   Her despair and pain were so great that she might have crumpled to the ground where she stood if the impulse to escape had not been stronger.
    Shelter could be bought in one of the other cottages, but there was no point to it, no point at all. Why buy a few more months of increasingly painful life surrounded by disapproving strangers?
    Slinging the strap of her bag across her shoulder, Madeline continued walking uphill along the rough track that followed the stream to the top of the dale. As a child she had followed this path when she could escape her chores, finding empty dells where she could dream of a world beyond Cleveden. It was only fitting that she escape along this track for the last time.
    The wind sharpened outside the shelter of the cottages, and icy snowflakes bit her face before whirling down to whiten the ground. Though it was almost dark, the meager available light diffused through the snow to lend a soft glow to her progress. In spite of the years that had passed, Madeline recognized the moist heaviness of air that heralded a major blizzard, the kind that could cut off the high country for days or weeks.
    Madeline had heard that freezing was a painless way to die, though she wondered who had come back