The Lost Love of a Soldier Read Online Free

towards love. Yet what else? All she knew was his love bore more weight than her mother’s or her sisters’. It owned her heart and made it pulse – not simply made it feel tender.
    The clock began to strike again, the sound echoing. One, two…
    Ellen knew how many times it would chime.
    Leaving the bible open, she rose, even now unable to fully disobey and close it.
    Her feet were numb and her knees stiff, the payment for what she was about to do.
    Everyone in the house retired early to avoid wasting candles. They rose with the sun and retired with it. They would all be in bed.
    The chilly air made her shiver, or perhaps it was the overwhelming mix of excitement and fear. She still could not believe she was doing this. She took a leather sewing bag from a cupboard and began empting it of embroidery threads and ribbons. The clock outside chimed nine… ten… eleven…
    Ellen’s eyes adjusted to the shadows cast by the moonlight pouring through the open curtains, she looked about the room.
    One hour.
    She picked out undergarments and three of her muslin dresses. Then she fetched her hairbrush and the mirror her mother had bought her when she’d reached six and ten. That had been over a year ago, but she could remember the day as if it were yesterday. She’d been here in her room, and Pippa had been brushing her hair out before bed with her usual one hundred strokes. Her mother had come in to say goodnight and she’d carried a beautiful wooden box containing the set.
    When she’d given it to Ellen, she’d said it was to mark Ellen becoming a woman. She’d kissed Ellen’s cheek and wished her happiness.
    That is what she was running to – happiness. But she couldn’t fit the beautiful box in her bag, so she left that behind and just packed the brush and mirror.
    She sifted through her gloves and picked four pairs, and she picked a dozen ribbons to change the look of her dresses, and some lace.
    She had no ball gowns, she’d never been to a ball, although she’d watched one through a door that had been left ajar when her father had held one here. She did pack two of her evening gowns though. But there were many things she had to leave behind, bonnets, shoes, dresses, her lovely room with its pretty paper painted with birds – her sisters – her mother.
    Pain caught in her bosom, sharp and tight, like the press of a little knife slipping into her flesh. How would she live without them, and yet how would she live without Paul? And if she chose to stay, what if Papa would not bend and he forced her to take the Duke of Argyle? No, she was doing the right thing.
    She stopped and looked about the room. She could take nothing else. But she wished she’d thought to cut a lock of her mother’s and Penny’s hair at some point in her life to keep as a reminder.
    She wiped a tear away before closing the bag and securing the buckle. Then she took her riding habit from where it lay in a drawer and began changing. The thick velvet made it too hard to fit in the bag and it would keep her warm as they travelled.
    It was a fabric her mother had urged her to buy, a burgundy red, as deep a colour as port. She was lucky that it fastened at the front so she could dress in it without Pippa’s help.
    When it was on, she looked in her long mirror which stood against the wall in the corner of her room, and saw a woman. Not a child anymore. A woman about to desert her family. Sighing rather than face the guilt which crept in, overlaying her excitement, she turned away to collect her bonnet, cloak and a pair of kid leather gloves. She would have taken her muff, but she feared carrying too much. Lastly she put on her half boots, and laced them neatly.
    Then she looked into the mirror again, at the Duke’s daughter. She would not be that now. She would be an officer’s wife. She would no longer live in luxury but in simplicity. It was what she chose. It was what she wanted.
    Her gaze spun about the room, looking at everything one last