The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) by Sydney Alexander Page A

blush, as horrified two years later and a continent and ocean away as she had been that moment.  
    He was plucking straw from her hair when the groom arrived, panting from his climb down from the rooms beside the haymow where he slept at night and, fortunately, during quiet afternoons when no one wanted the carriage. 
    “Is she alright, milord?” the boy asked. He had seen her ride out with Lord Walsall and the lady always looked so happy in his company. He assumed she was safe, then, if the young lord was with her. 
    “Her father has died,” Edward said shortly, and she quivered and leaned against him, burying her face in his shoulder, passion spent but for the awful, relentless grief squeezing at her heart. 
    She had thought then that she would never be parted from Edward, not for a blessed moment. He had stayed close to her, taken a suite within the house with her Aunt Mary in attendance as chaperone, and if Aunt Mary was plagued by migraines and a sensitivity to light and sound so grievous that she slept with a mask and earmuffs, well, it would be unkind to name her illness a blessing but it certainly had a great deal to do with Cherry’s invitation to her to come and stay at Beechfields.
    And then… and then he had gone off on that trip, at the request of his father. It should have been a short excursion to their holdings in the north country; he should have been home within the sennight. They should have been married by the end of the month. Their slate of indiscretions would be wiped clean by a marriage license and a family breakfast.
    He had come back in a box.
    A carriage accident.
    Such a dull death for an adventurous man.
    They had talked of South America, they had talked of sailing away from England and all its prejudices, from the books of peerage and the whispers of gossips who suspected — had the groom said something? — who said she was no better than she should be, who said that she was an adventuress. “You are an adventuress,” he had laughed, and wiped tears from her eyes when she had been huddled over some new slight in one of the gossip papers. “I shall take you on great adventures, you see, and that is the sort of adventuress you shall be.”
    And he had died when a carriage had rolled over, a wheel broken in a stone, dead in the mud of England, and there had never been any adventures at all.
    This was an adventure. She was living up to his hopes of her, she thought. She was an adventuress again, staking her claim in the new world, putting down roots in the wide prairie. “An adventuress,” she whispered, and the ladies went on talking without noticing her, the countrywomen with their broad accents and their simple dresses and their talk of children and baking and menfolk, and she thought that while it wasn’t the adventure any of them, not herself nor her father nor Edward, would have chosen for her, she would do her very best to live up to their expectations.
    “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Beacham?” Patty Mayfield was saying brightly. Cherry blinked and came back to the present.
    “I’m so sorry, Miss Mayfield, what was that?” she asked gracelessly, but Patty was not perturbed.
    “I was saying that you live right next door to Jared Reese!”
    One of the other young ladies tittered, and her companion elbowed her. “Gracious, Hetty, mind your manners!” But she was giggling too.
    Cherry was looking at the ladies with confusion. The tall one who had elbowed the giggling Hetty smiled. “Hetty’s sweet on Jared Reese,” she explained. “But so are all of us.”
    “Jared?” Cherry asked blankly, as if she had never heard the name before. “Jared Reese?” There was surely some sort of mistake. Or the young ladies of Bradshaw had been raised to have some very strange opinions of what was desirable in a man.
    “Those eyes!” Hetty sighed. “Blue as the sky before a storm.”
    “Hetty writes poetry,” Patty explained in an apologetic tone. “She can’t help