WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE Read online

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  Everyone knew the earl of Penhollow needed a wife, so one thunderous night the villagers gathered together to ask the ocean to deliver a bride to the bachelor lord…

  THE SEA BROUGHT HIM A WIFE

  When Pierce Kirrier, the handsome earl of Penhollow, rescued a mysterious beauty from the billowing ocean waves, he had no idea who she was—or where she came from. But at the first sight of this enchanting maiden, he had to claim her for his own. Taking her back to Penhollow Hall, he pampered her like a princess, determined to win her trust and her heart.

  BUT HER PAST COULD TAKE HER AWAY

  Nothing had prepared Eden to awaken in an elegant bedchamber in a remote corner of Cornwall. It was like living in a perfect dreamworld, where every wish came true. In Pierce’s arms she found a love—and bliss— she never knew existed. But once her secret past caught up with her, those dreams could be shattered—forever.

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  WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE

  CATHY MAXWELL

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 1998 by Cathy Maxwell

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-94935

  ISBN: 0-380-79709-7 www.avonbooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  First Avon Books printing: August 1998

  Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

  HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  * * *

  To Damaris Rowland who keeps me on my feet and in the ring

  * * *

  Prologue

  Cornwall, 1815

  Oblivious to the brewing storm, the Widow Haskell stood on a ledge c rocks jutting out into the sea. Her aged body swathed in a gray misshapen cape from nee. to toe, she held the small charm bag up to the night sky. The wind caught and tugged at the strands of her silver hair and molded the cap to her fragile figure. Angry waves tumbled over the rocks, washing her feet, but she wouldn’t bend to the howling wind. She needed the force of the elements to make the charm work.

  Behind her stood thirty silent villagers from Hobbles Moor. Their grave faces looked like pale moons in the darkness. They had gathered because the Widow said she needed their energy, their combined power. They believed in her and in the magic in her small bags with every inch of their souls in spite of what the vicar said.

  Among them was Betsy, a village girl who worked as a maid for Lord Penhollow. Beside her stood Lucy and Mrs. Meeks, the Penhollow cook and housekeeper respectively. Then there was Seth, the village cooper, who stood close to the mighty Dane, whose hammer rang out all day from the smithy. Also included in the number of villagers were Marten, the fisherman, and Kyle, the poacher who knew his way around the moors in the dark of night. Even Mr. Galesbrook, the tin mine manager, was there.

  “It is not a simple task we undertake this night,” the Widow said. “For this charm to work, we must all believe. Let the doubters leave!”

  No one moved, not even to blink an eye. An occasional drop of rain could be felt now, mixed in with the sea spray.

  The Widow Haskell turned three times with the charm bag held high over her head. Even though she had to be close to eighty-five years of age, her footing on the slippery rock was sure. She mumbled an incantation, the words more ancient than herself.

  Betsy strained to hear what words the Widow spoke. She’d been raised to have more faith in the Widow’s charms and cures than in Dr. Hargrave’s entire collection of medicines. Over her eighteen years, she’d seen the Widow cure warts, bring a dead calf back to life, and heal a child of smallpox by hanging a chicken upside down from a cottage beam and plucking its feathers.

  But then, tonight they were after more serious business.

  The Widow Haskell clasped the bag in one hand and clapped the other against it three times before lowering her arms. She raised her face to the sky and stood a moment, listening.

  They all listened, their bodies tense in the silence.

  The Widow spoke, her thin, reedy voice now strong with authority. “Lucy Wright, step forward.”

  Lucy shot a nervous glance in Betsy’s direction. “Go on,” Betsy mouthed.

  “I’m here, Widow,” the plump cook said with unaccustomed timidity.

  The Widow stared out over the turbulent water as if in a trance. “We cannot trespass where we are not wanted. Tell me again, Lucy Wright. Did you hear the Lady Penhollow, Lord Penhollow’s mother, ask for this love charm?”

  “Aye, I did. She said she was at her wit’s end. She and her son had just quarreled. She demanded that he make an offer of marriage to Mr. Willis’s daughter, but he refused, saying she was too young. Then our lady threw a terrible tantrum and insisted he go to London to seek a bride. She said he was rich enough now to tempt the daughter of a duke. He said he’d not have a London bride. You should have heard her, Widow. Her shouts vibrated through my kitchen.”

  Betsy and the other villagers listened intently. Pierce Kirrier, the earl of Penhollow, was more important to the people of Hobbles Moor than the Prince Regent and Parliament combined. The family lines of the earl could be traced back to the days of King Arthur. The villagers knew this because their own Cornish roots ran just as deep.

  Now the Penhollow line was in jeopardy. Lord Penhollow needed to marry and sire an heir—and no one wanted another London bride.

  “Aye, our Lord Pierce is a wise one for refusing to go to London. His father made that mistake,” Dane said. “London brides lack the proper mettle a Cornishman needs in a bride.”

  Several heads nodded their agreement. They might sympathize with Lady Penhollow’s anxiousness to see her son wed, but they didn’t trust her. In spite of having lived in their midst for thirty-four years, the beautiful London heiress Pierce’s father had brought to Penhollow Hall as a bride was considered an outsider, and a sorry mother to boot.

  “He’s lucky he had us to take care of him,” Mrs. Meeks said. “After he was born and his father returned to London—”

  “And his drinking, gambling,” Seth grumbled.

  “My lady practically drove him to that,” Mrs. Meeks said, bristling with deep-seated loyalty to the old earl. “Furthermore, there isn’t much good you can say about a woman who didn’t have the strength to raise her son the way she should have. She was a pampered city miss when she first came to us, always putting on airs when everyone knows her wealthy father was really nothing more than a butcher before he made his fortune selling meat to the army. The only thing she’s ever worried about is being accepted by the gentry.” She said the word “gentry” as if it left a bad taste in her mouth—and Betsy knew exactly what she meant, as did the others. They had no use for the area gentry like Mr. Willis and his friends, Lord Danbury and Lord Baines, with their uppity ways.

  “I say it was a blessing we raised him,” Dane countered. “Otherwise, he’d have grown into as sorry an excuse for a man as his father. Now he knows how to wield a blacksmith’s hammer with the best of them.”

  “And there isn’t a ship on the sea he can’t sa
il,” Marten added. “I took him onto my boat when he was half the size of a minnow, and I taught him to swim too. Threw him right into the ocean, I did, and he came up a-swimmin‘.”

  “He rode on my shoulders when I hunted rabbit and squirrels,” Kyle announced proudly. “I taught him to respect the land and the wild beauty of the moors.”

  “And from me, he learned how to mine that same land and grow rich,” Mr. Galesbrook said, his deep voice as proud as that of the others.

  Betsy nodded. The villagers had raised Pierce Kirrier and molded him into the sort of man they thought the lord of Penhollow Hall should be—and he had not disappointed them.

  To Betsy’s thinking, there was no finer man walking the face of the earth than her Lord Pierce. He was built like one of Arthur’s legendary knights, tall, broad-shouldered, and with the strength of seven men. And he was as handsome as the fabled Lancelot. No one in Hobbles Moor had been surprised that once Lord Pierce had rebuilt the family fortune, young lasses from good families all over Cornwall, and Devon too, were lining up to marry him.

  The villagers also agreed with his mother that at one and thirty, the time had come for him to take a wife.

  They just didn’t agree with Lady Penhollow that there was any woman among the gentry good enough for him—or at least, not that they’d met.

  The Widow Haskell interrupted their bragging. She questioned Lucy. “But did his mother ask for a love charm? The charm is only powerful when requested by one who is linked by blood.”

  “Aye, she did. After he left the room, she shouted after him, ”I’m tempted to use one of those superstitious love charms you Cornish are always brewing.“ Those were her exact words and they’re enough, aren’t they?”

  The Widow Haskell drew herself up until she appeared almost twice as tall to Betsy as she had a moment before. Her eyes burned with fury. “She mocks us?”

  In one swift movement, she spread her arms out wide, the fingers of her left hand holding the charm bag. “Betsy, where is the lock of Lord Pierce’s hair you promised me?”

  Betsy fumbled in the pocket of her skirt and pulled out several strands of hair she’d sneaked from the hairbrush in his room. “This is the best I could do, Widow Haskell.”

  The Widow’s bony fingers closed over the silky black hairs before they blew away in the wind. “It is enough,” she said. She pushed the hairs through the drawstring opening of the charm and then looked up at the sky.

  “Listen, Winds and Force of Night! We ask you for a special blessing, for a charm more powerful than all others. We seek a wife, a woman worthy to be a countess, a woman above all others. Listen to what we ask of you.”

  The villagers now spoke as she’d prepared them to earlier.

  “Her beauty must rival that of the roses in a garden,” Betsy said.

  “But she must be practical,” Mrs. Meeks added.

  “And intelligent,” Samuel Cobbler said. After the Widow Haskell, he was the oldest person in Hobbles Moor and had been Lord Pierce’s unofficial tutor of sorts when the family’s fortunes had fallen so low they could not afford to hire a tutor. “She must share our lord’s love of books.”

  “She must be gentle, soft, and caring,” Dane said, “the way only a woman can and should be.”

  One by one the other villagers added their requests.

  “She must be handy with a needle.”

  “Kind. Our new mistress needs to be kind.”

  “And generous too.”

  “She must be able to laugh.”

  “Courage,” Kyle said bluntly. “May she have a stout heart.”

  “It would be nice if she had a talent for music,” Lucy said wistfully.

  When all were done, the Widow Haskell added one final wish. “May the new lady of Penhollow Hall be fertile. May she give our lord many, many sons who will grow to be tall, proud Cornishmen!”

  “No daughters?” Betsy was bold enough to ask.

  The Widow looked down on her and smiled. “She will have a daughter,” she replied with that uncanny certainty that put a chill up Betsy’s spine.

  The Widow turned back to the sea and held the charm up in the air. “Winds of Love, search the corners of the world, and bring us a bride worthy of our Cornish earl!”

  To Betsy’s astonishment, the swirling storm clouds parted to reveal a full, shimmering moon as white as silver. Then lightning flashed, its jagged length cutting across the sky to the ocean.

  Behind Betsy, a woman screamed. Lucy threw her shawl over her head and huddled to the ground. Betsy ducked down beside her.

  Only the Widow Haskell stood tall and proud against the forces of nature.

  Slowly, the crone lowered her arms and whispered, “It is done.”

  She threw the charm bag into the sea.

  Chapter 1

  London

  Theirs was a forbidden friendship. The vicar’s wife and the whore. Two lives as boldly different as the sun from the moon, and yet, friendship thrived.

  Now it was about to end.

  From the safety of a clump of overgrown boxwoods that hid the secret door in the garden wall between the vicarage and the brothel, Eden watched her friend Mary Westchester, the vicar’s wife, who sat on a bench in the dappled shade of her garden waiting for Eden to appear. Today, Mary had brought her eleven-month-old daughter Dorothy, knowing the presence of the child would be a rare and welcome treat. She leaned back and held her babe high above her head. Dorothy giggled with delight and, laughing, her mother dropped her down and hugged her close.

  Eden stood riveted by the sight and sound of the child’s laughter.

  The door that separated the modest vicarage from the house where Eden lived was a reminder of the days when both houses had been part of the same abbey. Eden’s home, a four-story Gothic structure built of stone and mortar located not far from the financial center of London, was now an infamous, but expensively discreet brothel ironically called the Abbey.

  A wave of jealousy shot through Eden. She ruthlessly pushed the ugly emotion aside. It was not Mary’s fault that their lots in life were so different, or that Eden’s life was about to be turned upside down…

  “Hello,” Eden said, stepping from her hiding place.

  Mary turned with surprise, and then smiled, holding up the baby. “I brought Dorothy. My mother-in-law wasn’t feeling well and I was able to sneak the baby out of the house. She hardly ever lets me take Dorothy anywhere. She insists fresh air is bad for children, but I know she is wrong.”

  Eden came forward. “She’s beautiful.” Reverently, she dared to reach out and lightly touch one of the baby’s silver-blonde curls. She couldn’t help herself. The baby’s small, shell-shaped ears and perfect fingers fascinated her. Dorothy examined her seriously with wide blue eyes. “She looks exactly like you, Mary.”

  Mary laughed, obviously pleased with the compliment. “My mother-in-law insists that Dorothy takes after the Westchesters, but I think she is part and parcel of me,” she said, nuzzling the baby proudly. “Here, do you want to hold her?”

  Eden stepped back. “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Of course you could! She’s not going to bite you.” Mary held the baby up. “But be careful. She weighs more than you can imagine.”

  Eden shook her head, shying away. “I can’t.” She wasn’t fit to touch such perfection. She’d seen things and done things that made her feel soiled inside. None of that should ever touch a baby as sweetly loved as Dorothy.

  Mary lowered the baby to her lap, her eyes filled with concern. “Eden, what is the matter? You wouldn’t hold her the last time I brought her either.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Of course I would. I’m your friend. There isn’t anything you should be afraid to confide in me.”

  Her words caught Eden off guard.

  Immediately, Mary came to her feet and crossed to Eden’s side, holding the baby on one hip. “Eden, what is the matter? You’ve gone suddenly pale. Did I say something wrong?�
�

  Dorothy reached for the green silk bow on Eden’s bodice. Eden watched the baby’s chubby hands pull on the bow, untying it, before answering in a low voice, “I’ve been sold.”

  Mary stared at her blankly and then repeated, “Sold?”

  Eden ached to kiss the top of the baby’s head. She could smell the scent of milk on Dorothy’s breath. “Yes. Madame Indrani has finally heard from the Sultan Ibn Sibah. He’s agreed to pay the price she has asked for me.” Madame Indrani owned the Abbey. Eden reached out with one finger and stroked one of Dorothy’s soft curls. She’d imagined it would feel like silk. It didn’t. It felt of something finer and more ethereal. She raised her gaze to meet Mary’s. “I will be leaving the Abbey in two weeks’ time.”

  Mary’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “She can’t sell you. People don’t sell people, not anymore.”

  Dorothy tried to stuff the end of the ribbon into her mouth. “They do where I come from,” Eden said briskly. “Madame Indrani took me in off the street with the intent of selling me. It has always been my destiny.” She echoed the words Madame Indrani had used on her only an hour earlier.

  “How can you be so accepting of this?” Mary demanded.

  “Because I knew it would happen sooner or later.”

  Mary pulled the bodice ribbon out of Dorothy’s hands. “But I didn’t know!” She turned her back on Eden, hugging the baby close. Dorothy peeked over her mother’s shoulder, intent on the green ribbon.

  Eden took a moment to retie the ribbon before answering soberly, “No, I didn’t think you would understand.”

  Mary turned then, tears welling in her eyes. The tears surprised Eden.

  “Mary, you’re crying.”

  “What did you expect me to do? I’ve never had a friend that I’ve felt as close to as I do you.”

  Her words deeply touched Eden. “We are such a contrast, you and I. You are all porcelain and lace whereas I…” She finished with a small shrug of her shoulders.