Charity did not have many opportunities to spend much time alone.

There was always something that needed to be done at the vicarage — a household task to be attended to, a parishioner to take tea with or a neighbor’s child to be comforted. This meant that Charity enjoyed precious little time alone with her thoughts, which was a great pity to her because she enjoyed the pleasures of daydreaming above almost all other things.

Her one respite from the hum-drum existence of the vicarage was her daily walk, which she took every morning.

Being the daughter of a clergyman, Charity was perhaps more sharp of mind than most young ladies of her age and situation.

However, her native intelligence was counterbalanced by a great vivacity and lively sense of humour, which meant that despite her quick mind, she was perhaps not entirely suited to the life that her father had always envisaged for her — the life of a clergyman’s wife, as her mother had been before her. She had no real memories of her mother, but her father’s descriptions of her had featured the words ‘suffering’ and ‘duty’ very heavily.

Charity did not think a great deal about what she did or did not wish to be, or whom she hoped to marry. Her sole preoccupation was the thought of getting away from the stifling life at the vicarage, away from the demands of her father, away from the dreary and rigid expectations that were placed upon a clergyman’s elder daughter.

Charity’s daily walk gave her a small taste of this coveted liberty. However, the problem was that it left her hungry for more.

How dull the village looks, she thought, casting a glance over her shoulder at the little array of roofs, all surrounding the church spire. If only it would change, just a little. If only a little new life might be breathed into it.

So caught was she in her contemplation of the village where she had grown up, that she did not notice the presence of another, who was contemplating it too. It was only when she stepped upon a twig, and both parties started, that she realized that she was not alone in the grove.

There, standing not twenty feet away, was a young man.

By his face and his bearing, Charity knew at once that he was no stranger, and yet for the life of her, she could not guess where she had seen him before. Though she was sure she recognized the features of the gentleman - and a gentleman he certainly was, judging from his clothing and the courtly manner of his bow.

He seemed as surprised to see her as she was to see him, and for a few moments, their eyes locked together wordlessly, as if hailing one another with a greeting that could not be expressed by words. Inexplicably, Charity felt her heart flutter.

“I beg your pardon,” the young man said. “I feel certain that we have met before, yet I cannot recall ever having been introduced to you.”

Charity did not know how she best ought to respond. It seemed quite uncanny to her that the young man had articulated her own feelings so powerfully - that sense of recognition, that certainty that whoever this young man was, he was far from a stranger. There was a warmth in his eyes that she instinctively recognized, though she knew not how or why.

She curtsied and he bowed.

“It does me good,” the young man said, “having ranged so far and been away so long, to see a face like yours. It is a face that reminds me so powerfully of home.”

Charity felt herself blushing. She prided herself on not being the sort of girl who blushed, yet the blood rose unbidden to her cheeks. It was not precisely that the young man had paid her a compliment - and indeed, a very strange compliment it would have been.

Instead, it was the unguardedness with which he looked at her, the sense that he was eagerly absorbing every little aspect of her face. She sensed that this was a young man in some distress, though she knew not what the source of it could be.

“If you wish to compliment me in expressing yourself so, then I thank you most kindly for it,” she replied.

She scarcely knew what it was that she was saying, steering herself far more on instinct than the more concrete framework of social niceties. “For myself, I do not know how much I would wish to remind anyone of this place, dull and limited as it is.”

“Limited, indeed,” the young man replied spiritedly, glancing out across the hill and then back to Charity’s face, as though he could not bring himself to look away from it for too long. His eyes were a warm brown like the shining grain of polished wood.

“But dull, I could never allow. Not only is this place charming and beautiful but it has the immeasurable merit of being my home, and therefore I could never permit any slight upon it.”

Charity found herself a little taken aback at this. Anyone who she did not recognize at first glance in the village she presumed at once to be a stranger to these parts. And yet this man was clearly something in between a stranger and a friend.

He was someone who had gone from this place - and then returned again. He was, in short, all the things that Charity had wished to be and knew she would never be permitted to be, and she was immediately intrigued.

“I do not wish to suggest any slight upon this village,” Charity replied, “but it is, as they say, that familiarity breeds contempt. I believe that in this case, I must own the aphorism to be true.”

“You are familiar with it then,” the young man replied. His whole body moved then, with an impulsion that suggested he wanted to take a step toward Charity. Yet breeding, it seemed, overrode the instinct; he stood where he was, maintaining a gracious distance from an unknown lady.

“Of course,” Charity replied. “I have lived here all my life.”

The young man continued to survey her with a strange expression that Charity had never felt turned upon her before.

Yet the peculiarity of their encounter continued to linger in the air between them like woodsmoke. She felt prevented from making polite conversation — the form of dialogue to which she was most accustomed as the daughter of a clergyman. Yet she could not walk away. It had little to do with politeness and pertained far more to the sensation that she felt growing in her breast.

It was a sense of fascination, a feeling that this young man might perhaps have things to say that she had never heard before, things that might somehow break the stifling monotony of this small village, this small world.

“I fear I have taken up too much of your time,” the young man said abruptly. He, too, had appreciated the oddness of their encounter. “I thank you for your pleasant conversation and bid you a very good day.”

He lifted his hat to her in a jerking movement; he was not quite sure whether to pay such a conventional nicety at the end of such an unusual conversation. Charity in turn curtsied, but that, too, felt rushed and strange.

As the young man walked away down the hill in long, distracted strides, Charity understood abruptly that he had not given her his name, nor had she offered her own.

It was the sort of encounter where names scarcely seemed to matter, Charity reflected to herself. I cannot say that I have had another encounter quite like that one in all my life.

It was only once the young gentleman had almost disappeared from sight that Charity realized with a jolt where she had seen him before.

She recognized that face from when they had played together as children, long before the distinctions of rank had come between a clergyman’s daughter and a duke’s only son.

The Duke had always been an eccentric. He had thought nothing of the vicar’s daughter playing with his son, while the two men indulged in theological debate, always ending in the Duke vouching his support for the parish.

It had been a subject of gossip — indeed, perhaps the only subject of gossip that anyone cared about — when Adam Harding had disappeared from his father’s house.

Some reports claimed he had been disinherited. Moreover, some insisted he must have done something very wicked to incur his father’s bitter wrath. All were elevated with a tinge of scandal, a conviction that some unforgivable event had touched the life of the Duke of Mornington’s golden son.

Charity had scarcely formed any opinion of the matter one way or another. All she knew, looking at the figure of Adam Harding as it receded into the distance, was she had never before seen a young man who looked so haunted.

That was why he was so pleased and so troubled to be home again…

Though she had not seen Adam Harding in ten years or more, she would have known those brown eyes anywhere.

Two questions struck her at precisely the same moment, both with a great deal of force.

What could it be that had brought Adam Harding back?

And what terrible deed could have driven him away from his father in the first place?