Dare to Love Read Free

adamantly refused to take a gypsy’s bastard into his home. He died of a heart attack six years later, just days after my grandmother succumbed to lung fever, and it was only then that Meg was able to take me out of the orphanage. It was an unconventional thing to do, of course, and the county was scandalized. My aunt didn’t care that the gentry no longer called, that the villagers held her in contempt. Still unmarried, heiress to all her father’s estate, she devoted herself to me, to doing all she could to compensate for those first six years.
    A gentle breeze ruffled through the oak leaves overhead. Pale shadows played over the grave of Alicia Lawrence. Once, long ago, I had hated her, had blamed her for those six years spent in the bleak gray orphanage, for the cruelty and the taunts of the village children after I came to live at Graystone Manor, but I understood her now, and I felt only sadness. She had loved unwisely, perhaps, but she had loved with all her heart, and I knew it would be that way with me, too. A faded watercolor and an unmarked grave were all that remained of my parents, but their blood was alive inside me, and after years of hurt and bitter resentment I had learned to be proud of it.

II
    Closing the cemetery gate behind me, I walked on down the road leading out of the village, and soon there was nothing on either side of me but wide open land. To the west the land extended for several acres to the edge of the cliffs that plunged down sharply to the waters below, and on the east, beyond the low graystone wall, there were flat fields spotted with towering haystacks. The road curved inland, disappearing below a slope, appearing again atop the slope beyond. I could see a small open carriage far away, heading in my direction, a tiny black toy in the distance, horse and driver barely visible. The sky stretched overhead a luminous gray-white barely stained with blue. The air smelled of salt and sea. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks below the cliffs, and seagulls crying out as they dipped and soared. After Bath with its elegant Georgian buildings and narrow streets and formal gardens, Cornwall seemed like a foreign country, bleak, brooding, with a stark, primeval beauty all its own.
    Despite the grief so heavy inside me, I responded to the land and its harsh beauty. I longed to clamber over the rocks below, again, and feel the sea mist stinging my cheeks, as the waves slammed against ancient stone and sprayed geysers of water into the air. I longed to rush across the moors once more with the wind tearing my hair, to feel again that wild, untamed feeling that had possessed me when I used to race to meet the gypsies and dance the savage, sensual dances they had taught me. Three years at the academy and ballet school had given me polish and poise, but behind the demure, wellbred facade the lonely, restless spirit remained the same. I could never be like the other girls at school, no matter how much I tried. Perhaps that was why dancing meant so much. In dance I could express all those surging emotions. Even in the carefully stylized steps of ballet, I felt a release.
    Walking slowly down the road, surrounded by country air and sunlight, I thought of Madame Olga and the ambition she had inspired in me. The once renowned Russian ballerina had come to the academy to give lectures on the dance. She was ancient, a tiny woman with wrinkled skin and enormous black eyes that seemed to burn. Her hair was sleeked back, fastened in a tight bun on the back of her neck, and she was swathed in sables. She wore a gigantic emerald on one finger of her scrawny hand, the huge stone glittering with greenish-blue fires. A quarter of a century before, she had been the toast of Europe, and one heard that kings had vied for her favors, that the Czar had given her a fortune in jewels, that an English duke had committed suicide when she refused to return his affections.
    I was dazzled, and so nervous I could