She laughed. “Truly?”

He nodded. “On my honor. Were you swimming?”

She shook her head and lied. “No.”

His legs were bare, his wet breeches rolled up. He smiled. “I’ll look the other way while you finish dressing.”

She felt a pang of fear. “You shouldn’t be here!”

“Don’t tell anyone and I won’t.”

She looked about her, but could see no one watching. She put on stockings and shoes, her apron, and laced up her dress.

Toby made her laugh. She felt no fear of him. She had never met anyone with whom it was so easy to talk. Her father’s absence meant time was not pressing on her and they talked all afternoon. Toby lay on his stomach as he told her of his unhappiness with the war and of his wish to fight for the King rather than his father’s side. She felt a chill go through her when he proclaimed his loyalty for the enemy. He smiled at her, teasing her gently, but asking an unstated question at the same time. “You wouldn’t support the King, would you?”

She looked at him. Her heart was beating loud. She smiled back shyly. “I might.”

For you, she was saying, I might even change the loyalty in which I was reared.

She was a Puritan girl, protected from the world, and she had never been allowed more than four miles from home. She had been raised in the harsh morality of her father’s angry religion, and though he had insisted that she learn to read, it had been only so she could search the scriptures for salvation. She was ignorant, kept deliberately so, for the Puritans feared the knowledge of the world and its seducing power, yet not even Matthew Slythe could rein in his daughter’s imagination. He could pray for her, he could beat her, he could punish her, but he could not, though he had tried, stop her dreaming dreams.

She would say later that this was love at first sight.

It was, too, if love was a sudden, overwhelming urge to know Toby Lazender better, to spend time with this young man who made her laugh and feel special. She had been walled in all her life, and the result had been that she dreamed of the wild world outside, seeing it as a place of laughter and happiness, and now, suddenly, this emissary from beyond the wall had broken in and found her. He brought happiness and she fell in love with him there and then, beside the stream, making him the object of all the dreams that were to come.

He saw a girl more beautiful than any he had seen before. Her skin was pale and clear, her eyes blue, her nose straight over a wide mouth. When her hair dried it fell like spun gold. He sensed a strength in her that was like fine steel, yet when he asked if he could come again she shook her head. “My father won’t allow it.”