Running from Scandal

** (#ulink_c836fdb5-f1f4-55a1-9de9-400854b20901)Castonbury Park Regency mini-series

‡ (#ulink_cc7896ba-2fd4-56a1-8b55-7541c56ef287)Bancrofts of Barton Park

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Running

from Scandal

Amanda McCabe

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

AUTHOR NOTE

When I was about eight I found a battered paperback copy of Emma in a bag of secondhand books at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t know anything about Jane Austen then (except a vague thought that she’d lived a long time ago and never got married!), but I was drawn in by the two girls in white gowns and feathered bonnets on the cover and started reading. I was dragged right into the world of Emma Woodhouse and her friends and family in Highbury, and refused to do anything else until I’d finished the book! Then I ran to the library and checked out all the Austen novels. That was the beginning of my Regency love, which goes on to this day.

For a long time I’ve wanted to try writing a story in the style of an Austen novel. Not in her writing style, of course—no one can copy that—but in what I loved so much about her plots: the life of English villages and country houses, the close bonds that can form between families (especially sisters) and friends in such places, the romances that blossom even when their prospects look bleak.

I finally found the right characters in my Bancroft sisters, Jane and Emma, and the happily-ever-afters they found at Barton Park with their handsome heroes. I started to feel as if I could have lived in that neighbourhood, too—it was such a fun world to spend time in, and I was sorry to say goodbye to it all. But I know Jane and Emma go on happily there!

And watch for a little epilogue story coming soon, where we see what happens when Melanie Harding and Philip Carrington find themselves unwillingly married …

Contents

Prologue (#u19974ebe-69ef-5a89-b19e-c59f1ef724f1)

Chapter One (#ueb2e733e-f7fb-5da9-95e5-c1dee530ef27)

Chapter Two (#ufebba46b-93ae-5e29-836e-e0a7149d10ff)

Chapter Three (#u65b32a54-19b5-5803-bf05-b003a2259fcf)

Chapter Four (#u32fd3ec0-acea-5ee5-bee7-fd487b9d4133)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue

England—1814

Emma Bancroft was very good at holding up walls. She grew more adept at it every time she went to a party, which was not very often. She was getting a great deal of practice at it tonight.

She pressed her back against the wall of the village assembly room and sipped at a glass of watery punch as she surveyed the gathering. It was a surprisingly large one considering the chilly, damp night outside. Emma would have thought most people would want to stay sensibly at home by their fires, not get dressed in their muslin and silk finery and go traipsing about in search of dance partners. Yet the long and narrow room was crowded with laughing, chattering groups dressed up in their finery.

Emma rather wished she were home by the fire. Not that she entirely minded a social evening. People were always so very fascinating. She loved nothing better than to find a superb vantage point by a convenient wall and settle down to listen to conversations. It was such fun to devise her own stories about what those conversations were really about, what secret lives everyone might be living behind their smiles and mundane chatter. It was like a good book.

But tonight she had left behind an actual good book at home in the library of Barton Park, along with her new puppy, Murray. Recently she had discovered the fascinations of botany, which had quite replaced her previous passions for Elizabethan architecture and the cultivation of tea in India. Emma often found new topics of education that fascinated her, and plants were a new one. Her father’s dusty old library, mostly unexplored since his death so long ago, was full of wonders waiting to be discovered.

And tonight, with a cold rain blowing against the windows, seemed a perfect one for curling up with a pot of tea and her studies, Murray at her feet. But her sister Jane, usually all too ready for a quiet, solitary evening at home, had insisted they come to the assembly. Jane even brought out some of her fine London gowns for them to wear.

‘I am a terrible sister for letting you live here like a hermit, Emma,’ Emma remembered Jane saying as she held up a pale-blue silk gown. ‘You are only sixteen and so pretty. You need to be dancing, and flirting and—well, doing what young, pretty ladies enjoy doing.’

‘I enjoy staying here and reading,’ Emma had protested, even as she had to admit the dress was very nice. Definitely prettier than her usual faded muslins, aprons and sturdy boots, though it would never do for digging up botanical specimens. Jane even let her wear their mother’s pearl pendant tonight. But she could still be reading at home.

Or hunting for the lost, legendary Barton Park treasure, as their father had spent his life doing. But Jane didn’t have to know about that. Her sister had too many other worries.

‘I know you enjoy it, and that is the problem,’ Jane had said, as she searched for a needle and thread to take the dress in. ‘But you are growing up. We can’t go on as we have here at Barton Park for ever.’

‘Why not?’ Emma argued. ‘I love it here, just the two of us in our family home. We can do as we please here, and not worry about...’

About horrid schools, where stuck-up girls laughed and gossiped, and the dance master grabbed at Emma in the corridor. Where she had felt so, so alone. She was sent there when their mother died and Jane married the Earl of Ramsay, Hayden. Emma had never wanted her sweet sister to know what happened there. She never wanted anyone to know. Especially not about her foolish feelings for the handsome dance teacher, that vile man who had taken advantage of her girlish feelings to kiss her in the dark—and tried so much more before Emma could get away. He had quite put her off men for ever.