Free The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn Page A

girls, Father,” she pointed out boldly. “I am almost of the age to be a wife—and I am your youngest daughter!”
    These last words stopped him. He regarded her as if seeing her for the first time. “Perhaps it is time that I begin to seek suitable matches for you girls,” he said with thoughtful deliberation.
    Suitable matches?
    Now what had she done?
    She panicked as alarming images of balding, bejeweled dukes and portly merchants in fur-trimmed robes formed in her head. “Wouldn’t it be better if we could meet young men we might grow to love,” she suggested.
    Her words seemed to awaken a disturbing memory within him. “To marry for love is foolishness. No good can come of it,” he snapped, resuming his walk toward the bedchamber.
    She wanted to point out that he had married for love and the twelve children he so wanted to protect had come from that union. But there was an ominous darkness in his expression, and he was so angry that it didn’t seem wise to press him any further on the subject.
    He reached the bedchamber where the locksmith was installing an iron bolt to the outside of the door. “What?” Rowena exclaimed when she realized he meant to lock them in their room from the outside.
    She followed him into the room where her sisters still appeared sleepy-eyed, though they were awake.Mary was there, too, distributing new slippers from a straw basket to each sister.
    “Here is how it will be from now on,” he announced to his daughters. “Every morning Mary will open the door and you will line these new slippers up outside the room for my inspection. She will then return the slippers to you and escort you girls to the sewing room. There, servants will bring you your meals except for supper, which you will take with me in the dining hall.”
    “It’s as if we are in a prison!” Eleanore objected.
    Sir Ethan shot her a severe, warning glance. “You are being kept safe.” Whirling back toward the door, Sir Ethan departed.
    “This is your fault!” Eleanore confronted Rowena. “I know you have been going out. You were just out now, weren’t you? He caught you, didn’t he?”
    Rowena dropped her head as tears brimmed in her eyes. This was so awful—trapped like a bird in a cage, held more tightly than ever, just when the world had seemed to be opening as never before, in the very same hour in which love had come to her.
    “Leave your sister alone,” Mary scolded Eleanore as she walked toward the door. “Your father caught me trying to burn your ruined slippers. That’s why he’s on this rampage.”
    “And he also caught me coming in from the forest,” Rowena murmured, her head still hung. The opening she’d worked on so hard and so long—that was gone now too, all those hours wasted.
    “Does father think we were all in the forest?” Brianna asked.
    “I told him it wasn’t so, but that’s what he thinks,” Rowena admitted.
    “Then he doesn’t know anything about the opening in the floor?” Helewise mentioned.
    Rowena shook her head.
    “Caverns sometimes lead to the surface,” Eleanore said. “I recall a romantic book from France I once read where the lovers escaped an evil sorcerer by running into a cavern. If there was a way in, there was a way out.”
    “So you’re saying that we might still be able to find a way to get out of here by traveling through the tunnels,” Chloe said excitedly.
    Eleanore glanced at the closed bedchamber door. As she turned, they could hear the new bolt clanking shut. Together, the sisters scowled at the locksmith they knew was on the other side.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Eleanore assured them. “I believe that the figure Rowena saw in the bowl was our mother.” This news was greeted by a wave of murmuring, some of it excited, some disbelieving. Eleanore shushed them and continued. “If she still lives, it’s up to us to find her. I’ve always been angry because I believed she abandoned us, but if she is in trouble we must go to