The Bishop's Daughter Read Free Page A

affecting to look so prim, so disapproving, all the while she kept stealing glances upward at the statue's firmly muscled buttocks, it became entirely too much for Harry's self-control. He burst into a roar of laughter that seemed to ring all the more loudly amid the astonished silence of the crowd.
    Indignant faces turned toward him only to go pale with recognition. Through his peals of mirth, he heard the gasps, his name rippling through the crowd like a rush of wind through the willows. His stepmother let out a piercing cry and clutched at her heart. The Reverend Thorpe so far forgot himself as to take the name of the Lord in vain.
    Harry tried to speak, but couldn't. He could only glance helplessly about him, wishing he could find at least one other kindred spirit to share this moment, someone else who could see the humor of the situation.
    Instead he encountered a face that drove the laughter from his lips, the last face in the world he had expected to encounter. Standing close to his shoulder was a solemn-looking lady garbed in pearl gray, so close that he wondered how he could have missed her before.
    Harry experienced a shock not unlike the one he had felt when blasted from his saddle at Waterloo. He stared into violet eyes that registered a mingling of disbelief, joy, and reproach.
    "Kate!" Harry cried hoarsely.
    Kate's lips attempted to form his name as what little color she possessed drained from her cheeks. Harry retained just enough presence of mind to open his arms wide and catch her as she swayed into a dead faint.
     

     
     
     
Chapter Two
    Miss Kathryn Towers had nearly decided not to attend the dedication of Lord Lytton's memorial. An hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, she had lingered in the parlor window seat of the cottage she shared with her mother in the village of Lytton's Dene.
    It was unusual for Kate to sit idle for so long, staring vacantly out the window, but that is what she had been doing, her gaze fixing upon the elder bushes growing just beneath the latticed panes, their white blossoms thick among the greenery like a scattering of summer snow.
    Snow . . . Would she ever be able to think of it again without also thinking of Harry? It had been winter when he had first come crashing, quite literally into her life, that last winter when Papa had still been alive. A sad, half smile tipped Kate's lips.
    She had been bundled up in a fur-lined cloak, strolling in the garden of the Episcopal Palace at Chillingsworth, watching the deep blue of twilight fade to darkness. The full moon rose, shining a silvery glow over the snow-shrouded landscape, making the garden sparkle like crystal. The blanket of white had cast a hush over everything, an aura of enchantment, of expectancy as though something was about to happen. Or was that now only her imagination in looking back? For something had happened. . . .
    A curricle had come smashing through the low-lying hedge, finishing up by knocking over the statue of John the Apostle. One wheel of the carriage broke, flinging its driver into what remained of the rose bed.
    With a cry of alarm, Kate rushed forward, but the man was already climbing from the wreckage quite unperturbed, dusting snow from the torn capes of his garrick. As he went round to quiet his horse, he said, "Sorry, miss, but it was either your statue or a little urchin who slipped into the road."
    "It—it was John the Apostle," Kate stammered.
     "Who? The urchin?"
    "No, the statue," she said solemnly.
    For some reason, that made the stranger laugh. "Rather odd place to keep an apostle."
    Secretly Kate agreed with him. She had always said the statue was placed far too close to the hedge, although she would not have expressed her opinion in quite the same manner.
    As the moonlight outlined his profile, the thick waves of coal dark hair, the strong, stubborn jaw-line, she recognized who he was. Kate felt a tingling of alarm as she realized it was a most dangerous man who had invaded