Adam nodded and set off back to Ventnor to find a boat to take him to Yarmouth.

Olivia had listened to this exchange in slowly dawning horror. “Anthony, you can’t still mean to rescue the king!” she exclaimed. “Not now that they know.” She looked at him as if he was out of his mind.

“My flower, I have a promise to keep,” he said, taking her hand and walking with her back to the field where they had left Gowan’s horse.

“Don’t be ridiculous! Whoever this woman is, she wouldn’t expect you to do this now. No woman in her senses would.”

Anthony’s response was instant and unthinking. “This is my business, Olivia. My commitments are my affair, not yours.”

She pulled her hand out of his, stopping dead on the lane. “What are you saying?” Her eyes were bewildered. How when they had talked of love could he dismiss her concern so curtly?

He read her confusion and her anger in her eyes and moderated his tone as he tried to explain. “I’m the master of a ship, Olivia. Men rely on my decisions. I must make those decisions alone and take their consequences myself. It’s always been like that for me, and, believe me, I learned the lessons the hard way.”

“So you never listen to advice?” she demanded in disbelief. “You never change your mind?”

“Of course I do,” he said with a touch of impatience. “But the final decisions are mine.”

Her father would have said the same, Olivia reflected. She frowned, thinking of what Anthony had just said. “You learned the hard way. As a child, you mean? From your parents?”

“You could say that.”

Olivia lost all patience. “Damn you, Anthony!” she cried. “Isn’t it time you explained some things to me? Don’t you owe me something?”

Anthony gazed across her head, over the hedge to the sea, but he saw little of the scenery. How to explain what it was like to be an outsider, to belong nowhere? How to explain that to Olivia, whose own place in the world was so firmly entrenched? How could she understand?

“My mother and father were killed on the night of my birth. Ellen and Adam took care of me,” he said distantly.

“Is Ellen the one who would have you rescue the king?”

“A woman of a most powerful conviction,” Anthony said. “And since I owe her more than I could ever repay, I will do whatever she asks of me.”

“How were your parents killed?”

“They were murdered.”

“In Bohemia?”

“Yes… Does that satisfy you, Olivia? I don’t wish to discuss this further.”

She struggled to understand what that night must have been like. That night of violent death and birth. So much blood, she thought. There must have been so much blood.

“But… but what of your grandparents, of other family?”

“I have no other family,” he said flatly. “Ellen and Adam are my friends and all the family I need.”

She heard the bitter finality in his voice.

“I don’t believe Ellen would ask this of you if she knew the danger you were in now,” Olivia stated shrewdly. She saw from the quick flicker of his eyes that she had hit truth.

He began walking again briskly as he spoke. “Be that as it may, I keep my promises. And I don’t like to give up a plan halfway.

“That’s foolhardy.” She was half running now to keep up with his rangy stride.

“No. Dangerous maybe. But as you know, the most dangerous enterprises are the most satisfying… and,” he added, “more often than not, the ones most likely to succeed.” He turned in to the field where the chestnut was grazing peacefully among the cows. “I have made certain changes to the original plan,” he conceded. “In light of changed circumstances.”

Olivia waited until he’d caught the chestnut and brought him back to the gate. “They’ll ambush you.”

“Maybe. But I’ll take precautions. They can’t know exactly when I’m going to make the attempt. Only the men of Wind Dancer know that. And they can’t know how I plan to do it, because only those same people know that… Up you get, now.” He took her by the waist and lifted her onto the horse.

“Please don’t do this,” she said as he mounted behind her. “I am so afraid for you.”

“O ye of little faith,” he mocked, reaching around her to grab the mane. “I was going to create one diversion on the battlements, but now I intend to stage a performance that will have every soldier and officer in the castle utterly occupied for the few minutes it will take the king to make his move.”

He laughed softly at the thought and Olivia knew she had lost this battle. If he believed he could do it, then he would do it. And he would succeed. She had to believe that.

“And when you have the king, when you’ve taken him safely to France, will you c-come back?” Her voice sounded thick.

“I come and go,” he said obliquely. “But this is where my ship has her anchorage. Where my friends are, where my crew have their families.”

“And if the king isn’t here, then my father will leave,” she said, gazing straight ahead as the chestnut cantered across the clifftop. The sea was very blue, sparkling with the morning sun, and the Dorset coast stood out so clearly it was almost as if one could reach across the dazzling water and touch it.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It is as it is.” Softly he quoted her earlier words, “Things being as they are. You being who you are, me being who I am.”

“What would you say if I said I would come with you?”

Anthony was silent for a minute, then he said, “I would be afraid that once the dream faded, as it must, you would not be happy.”

“And I would hamper you, constrict you,” she stated, her eyes still on the sea. The blue seemed fuzzy and she realized it was filtered through tears.

“I would worry that you were regretting the life you’d left. Your family, your loyalties, your place. Those are not mine and they mean nothing to me.”

He fell silent. Olivia stared ahead, feeling his hard body at her back. Was he right? Were passion, love, not strong enough to overcome such odds? But they had lived a dream, it had never been more than that. And one woke up from dreams.

“If we stayed on the island,” she said. “If we stayed on the island, then whenever you came back we could live the dream again.”

“But you cannot stay.”

“Would you wish to dream again?”

For a minute he didn’t answer her, then he said, making his voice flat and distant, “There was never a future to this. We both understood that. Be happy with what we’ve had. Carry the memories, as I shall.”

It took half an hour before they reached the boundary of Lord Granville’s property. A half hour in which their thoughts hung heavy and unspoken. As they approached the orchard, Olivia said, “Stop here.”

Anthony drew the chestnut to a halt and dismounted. He lifted Olivia down and held her hands. “I know of no other answer,” he said. “I would not be responsible for your unhappiness.”

“And I would not be responsible for yours,” she returned. Slowly she drew her hands from his. “Say goodbye. Say it now.”

He cupped her face and kissed her gently. “Farewell, Olivia.”

“Farewell.” She brushed his mouth with her fingertips, lingering as if to imprint forever the feel of his mouth on her skin.

Then she turned and ran from him. If he succeeded this night, the Granvilles would leave the island. She couldn’t bear to think then of Wind Dancer slipping into her chine in the darkness, when she herself was not asleep or wakeful in her bed in the house in Chale. Waiting for his return. She couldn’t bear to think of Wind Dancer on the open sea, with her master at the wheel and the deck beneath his feet, his hair blown back from his face, his strong throat bared to the wind as he looked up at the sails.

She couldn’t bear to think of him sailing away from her.

But she must bear it, because one couldn’t live entranced forever.


Anthony stood for a long time in the lane after she had disappeared into the trees. Had he been right? But he knew that he had. First would have come disillusion that would usher in contempt and then bitter dislike. They would have learned to hate each other as they pulled in different directions. There was no place for Olivia in his life, and he could not live hers. But he thought as he turned to go that his heart would break.


Olivia darted through the orchard, heading for the garden and the back stairs, hoping, although it seemed a forlorn hope, that she wouldn’t be seen in her strange garb by any of the servants.

She was so absorbed in her unhappiness that she nearly stepped into the path of her father and Rufus before the sound of their voices alerted her to their presence in the orchard. She froze, her heart banging against her ribs. Cato was talking to Rufus above little Evie’s importunate demand that her father carry her. They were so close, a mere row of fruit trees away.

Olivia almost without thinking scrambled into the branches of a crab apple tree whose massed foliage provided a perfect screen. The two men turned into the aisle and strolled towards Olivia’s tree, deep in conversation.

“How did the king take his removal?” Rufus asked, swinging his small daughter onto his shoulders.

“With dignity, as always,” Cato replied. “Newport barracks is rather more primitive than Carisbrooke, but he affected not to notice.”

“We found nothing at Puckaster Cove, or anywhere close to it,” Rufus said, adjusting his hold on Eve’s ankles as she bounced to grab a crab apple from the tree.

Evie pulled at the apple, bending its branch low.

Olivia shrank back against the tree trunk, holding her breath. Then the branch bounced back again as the men passed beneath the tree, and she breathed again.