"My very dear," he said. "Oh, my dear. I'd have given my life to spare you this. He's a villain of the lowest sort. I know that he made you believe he loved you, or you would never have been so rash, but, Callie, Callie…" He gazed at her, his eyes damp. "It is all lies. You're a substantial heiress. You're underage. These wretches with their polished address, they're full of any pretense in order to get you into their power." His lip curled with scorn. "But he'd never have touched a penny of your fortune. It's well protected for you, I've made certain of that. He knows it now, if he did not before."

She had nodded. She had not wholly believed him. Trev's sweet falsehoods had been still too close then, the way he made her feel too vivid to disbelieve.

Trev had said they would f ly to the border to be married, because neither of them was of age. In the years after, she was amazed to look back and think that she had ever had the nerve to fall in with such plans. But then she had always done so, whether it was a secret jaunt to see the finish of a horse race, amid a very mixed crowd of rowdies and questionable gentlemen, or a visit to the graveyard by a full moon. She had known he was wild, but she had trusted him. It had not seemed so bad or frightening to slip out of the house at midnight, as long as Trev would be waiting for her under the ancient yew that guarded her window.

No doubt those escapades had hardened and habituated her, rather like the criminal classes, to accept without serious question his idea that it would be a grand adventure to elope. Of course she had known it was an iniquitous thing to do, and that her father deeply disapproved of Trev and would never countenance a marriage between them, clandestine or otherwise, but all that she somehow had put aside in her euphoria that someone as splendid and handsome and enthralling as Trevelyan loved her.

She had barely been seventeen. She was not so naïve anymore. The point had been borne in upon her by three subsequent gentlemen just how unlikely it was that Lady Callista Taillefaire would inspire any true romantic passions in the male heart.

"Well," her father had said gruff ly. "I wish for you to go to your cousins in Chester for a time. But we'll take a visit up to Hereford first. You and I. There are some cattle sales I wish to see, and you will advise me on what I should buy. You'll like that, eh? We'll depart tomorrow, as soon as your maid can make ready."