Grace had no idea how long she’d been wandering in the fog. She didn’t know what lay ahead. Tall trees looming overhead shut out all light. Tangled undergrowth dragged at her shackled feet. Eyes of predators fixed on her from the shadows. Too exhausted to care, she sank to the ground. The smell of earth and pine filled her senses.

Confusion took hold of her. Her stomach clenched as the green world around her began to spin. Voices echoed from a distance. Around her, the forest dissolved, falling away like a painted canvas. She was not in a forest, but rather a bedchamber. The words became distinct.

“Her lungs have been affected, m’lord. But from what you tell me, that’s only to be expected.”

Grace peered at the man sitting on the bed beside her. Thick spectacles sat in a bed of bushy white brows atop a red, pock-marked nose. The ruddy face bore the deeply etched lines of advanced years.

She tried to draw a breath but couldn’t. Why didn’t they move the rock that was sitting on her chest?

She was dying. She’d been imprisoned in that basket. Sealed up alive in that tomb of wicker and wood. Lowered into the grave of some ship’s hold. Her cries had gone unanswered until finally she had no more will to call out, no more strength to fight against the feelings of desperation and anguish. The hatches were sealed, the darkness was complete, and time lost all meaning. How many days or weeks she’d lain in that basket, she didn’t know. Thirst and hunger tore at her insides for a while, but those afflictions too disappeared, only to be replaced by a vague desire for the end to come.

But that silent release was still far off, and painful thoughts of her dear father came back over and over. Finally, to combat the madness that she was certain would come, her mind conjured another world. Pages of books lit the darkness. Lines of poems and ballads appeared before her eyes. Everything she’d ever read came back to her now.

Her father called it her “talent.” Grace remembered everything: names, faces, numbers, and more. Her friends saw it as entertainment. They tested her and laughed as she recited chapters of books she’d read through only once. She could name the position of any card after having the deck displayed for only a moment. Some who knew of her talent referred to her as an oddity. A French scholar had once insisted on studying her. But her father would not allow it, and she was grateful for his intervention.

On that ship, locked in what she assumed would be her coffin, Grace had begun to recite aloud the words locked in her memory. Line after line, poem after poem, Irish ballad and French, text book and novel—each one reminding her that she was still alive.

But her voice had eventually grown quieter until only the pounding sound of the sea remained, the creaking of wood, and the sloshing of water below. Finally, even those sounds disappeared and silence claimed the darkness.

“I’d be sorely remiss in offering any words of optimism,” the old man said. His face moved out of her line of sight. “I can bleed her, m’lord, but I don’t know what good it’ll do her.”

No blood. Grace had seen too much of it in Antwerp. The blackening pool around the valet. The deep red stain on her father’s chest. While she’d been confined in the crate, her mind had returned to those moments. Awake or asleep, it didn’t make a difference. She kept seeing the dead. Even now Grace’s eyes burned, but she doubted she had a tear left to shed.

“No,” another man replied. “No letting of her blood. She’s not strong enough.”

She’d heard that voice before. The same deep and commanding tone. The man who’d lifted her out of that wicker tomb and carried her through the rain. She’d recited an Irish ballad for him, confused him with her words.

Safe, he’d said so confidently, placing her in the bed.

If he only knew how wrong he was.

Grace tried to focus on the tall, dark-haired blur hovering in the distance. Broad shoulders encased in a black coat dominated the wall beyond. She could hardly make out his features, but she heard the concern in his tone.

She tried to breathe again and struggled. Coughing wracked her body, and a searing pain ripped through her chest. Where was death now? Where was her release? Hadn’t she suffered enough?

When the spasms subsided a little, someone lifted her head from the pillow and spooned bitter medicine between her lips. Grace choked on it, and her body responded violently. She gasped in vain for air, and then the room went black around her once again.

* * *

Hugh had seen enough death. He didn’t want to witness it now.

Watching this woman gasp for breath brought back again the haunting memories of his loved ones, dying so far from home. She’d been murmuring lines from a ballad. He didn’t know the work, but it sounded like the farewell of a soldier dying on the battlefield.

Oh mother, adieu forever . . .

I am now on my dying bed . . .

If I had lived I’d have been brave . . .

I droop my youthful head . . .

Our bones do moulder . . .

Weeping-willows o’er us grow . . .

Hugh battled to suppress, for the thousandth time, his bitter anger at the French tyrant and his bloody war.

He stared at the woman, wondering who was missing her now. Like the mother in the poem, who was waiting for her, anguishing over what had become of her, not knowing if she was alive or dead?

Hugh hadn’t even known his wife and son were suffering until it was too late. Amelia had brought their precious child across the water to Spain without sending word to him. As Hugh and his light cavalry fought their way across Spain, she was waiting for him in Vigo. While he and his men protected the flank of the British Army on that horrible retreat through snow and freezing rain, Amelia and his three-year-old boy were dying of camp fever, wracked with pain, gasping for air, and clinging desperately to life. But it was no use. They died there in the seaside village near Corunna with no one to care for them, no family to comfort them, in the squalor of that godforsaken place, cut off from help and overcome with pestilence.

And he’d not been there when they needed him.

Hugh cursed the French again, as he had a million times. Later, in the fields of France and Belgium, he’d made them bleed for it, even as they continued to cut down his comrades around him. So many times he’d thrown himself into the thickest fray of battle, never caring if he lived or died. How many times had he wished he had died?

The woman drifted into a restless sleep, if that’s what it was. If she died now, he didn’t want to see it.

Hugh strode out of the room and stopped. Looking down the hallway at the long-unused rooms of this wing, he felt the pain coursing through him with the same fierceness it had the day he learned of his wife and son’s deaths. This part of the east wing had once been a place of joy for him. No longer. He still came up here, in spite of the pain it brought him. He had to. It was all he had left of them.

He looked back at the door where the woman lay, gamely struggling to breathe. She was a fighter, to be sure. But he couldn’t fathom how she’d come to be in that blasted crate.

He descended the stairs and went out into the yard. A light rain was still falling, though the lightning and rumbling thunder had long ago moved off to the east.

He followed the drive down past the stables to the carriage barn and went in.

Staring at the open crate, Hugh tried to calculate how long she must have been trapped in there. The basket was shipped from Antwerp. Someone had nailed the box shut. How was it possible that she would go unnoticed, unless she had intentionally hidden in there? She could have been drugged or knocked out and secreted in the basket. If that were the case, she’d been left in there intentionally to die. Or perhaps someone else had failed to intercept the shipment and let her out before she’d left Antwerp. The possibilities were numerous, but none of them left him feeling any easier about it.

Hugh inspected the crate. Nothing out of the ordinary struck him. Looking into the balloon gondola, he considered the torment of being confined in such a space. It was amazing that she’d survived at all.

Something caught his eye in the bottom of the basket. Several coins. Climbing in, he picked them up and held them to the light.

American coins.