Free Scandal's Reward by Jean R. Ewing

about to weep. She lay back on the sofa and waved Catherine to come to her. “Oh, Miss Hunter, I have such a headache . . .”
    Catherine softly massaged her mistress’s shoulders, but she felt almost faint.
    George had set cruel wire traps for rabbits, yet Charles de Dagonet had risked a beating to destroy them. As Papa had said, he hadn’t lacked courage, a boy who—whatever his athletic prowess—also wrote music and read the great poets. He must have hated to see suffering in a poor dumb animal to have risked intervention, knowing that Sir Henry Montagu would thrash him for his mercy like a common criminal. A terrible and bitter humiliation, surely, for the young pride that must have lain like an ocean behind those eyes. How else had he suffered with his violent uncle? She had never forgotten her own fear of Sir Henry when she and Amelia had encountered him in the grotto as children.
    Charlotte sniffed. “Well, if Father beat him with a horsewhip, I’m sure he deserved it.”
    Sir George laughed. “More than once! Mama would have stopped it if she could, wouldn’t you, Mama?”
    Lady Montagu sat up and Catherine’s hands fell away. Her heart felt numb.
    “Oh, my! I couldn’t really countenance it, my dears. How could I? It only made him the more determined, which your late father could never understand. Dagonet had an implacable will, even then. It was cruel treatment, yet the boy laughed at it and invited more. My poor sister’s only child!”
    “Don’t be sentimental, Mama!” Charlotte said. “If you ask me, Devil Dagonet deserved far more than a horsewhipping. After he drowned that servant girl, he should have been hanged. A man who would take advantage of a poor maidservant in his own house is no better than a dog—”
    “Miss Hunter!” Sir George Montagu interrupted his sister mid-sentence.
    Catherine looked up, her heart pounding.
    George was frowning at her. “Have you sent out the invitations to Mama’s dance yet? There’s some dashed boring names that I want to strike off the list.”
     

Chapter 6
     
    The day after the last harvest had been brought in, the first storms of autumn raced up the Bristol Channel. Torrential rain beat at the Lion Court windows all week, keeping Catherine miserably trapped indoors.
    Yet now the sun shone like a benediction overhead—and it was her free day.
    She ought to feel nothing but pleasure in this outing, yet Catherine felt haunted, filled with disquiet. She wanted to stride away forever, walk off into the sky and leave all her concerns behind. Instead, she was walking sedately up onto Exmoor with her sister Amelia at her side.
    Wild herbs and flowers scented a small breeze dancing over the moor.
    The path was slick, almost dangerously so in places. Catherine glanced down at her walking boots. Like Amy’s, the hem of her plain muslin dress was heavy with mud.
    “Oh, I’m so glad you told me, Cathy!” Amy seized her sister’s hand, forcing Catherine to look at her. “Dagonet destroyed those rabbit traps even though it earned him a beating every time? That was incredibly brave, don’t you think? Even if it can’t alter or excuse what he’s done since, it must cast a more favorable light on his character. You do agree, don’t you?”
    “Yes, I suppose so,” Catherine said with a wry smile. “I’m trying to be scrupulously impartial, you see, so I thought I should set at least this part of the record straight.”
    Amy had seemed uncomfortable ever since they’d left Fernbridge, but now her face lit up. “But it counts for so much when a man is kind to animals. I think that says something incredibly profound about his true nature. Surely you cannot believe him really cruel, after that?”
    “I don’t know,” Catherine said. “Perhaps it only compounds the mystery, that such a boy would grow up to be such a rogue.”
    “Perhaps we’ve judged too harshly all along, Cathy,” Amy said earnestly. “It’s so easy to blacken someone’s