Read To Have and to Hold Online
Authors: Rebecca King
To Have and to Hold
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
BY
REBECCA KING
First Published
in 2012
©2012 by Rebecca
King
The moral right
of Rebecca King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights
reserved.
No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any informational storage and
retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.
This is a work
of fiction.
Names, characters, places
and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously.
Any resemblance to any
actual persons, either living or dead, events or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Further books in
this series will be published shortly.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Isobel slowly closed
the bedroom door behind her, wincing as it squeaked loudly in protest.
In the silence of the midnight hour, the
noise was loud enough to awaken the entire household!
She waited for several long moments, heart
thumping heavily in her chest certain that any moment now she would hear the
heavy boots of her Uncle stomping down the hallway towards her, his face
mottled with rage at being disturbed at such an ungodly hour, all too ready to
give her another sound thrashing for simply being alive.
Her stomach
lurched sickeningly with a wave of nausea that surfaced at the thought of the
beating she would receive should she be caught outside of her room, on the
darkened landing.
“You can’t allow
nerves to get the better of you now!” She chastised herself, not with the only
chance of escape possible at last and freedom just a short, albeit nerve
wracking to journey across the upper hallway.
She stood
silently enshrouded in inky blackness and tried to quell the rapid thundering
of her heart.
With each passing moment,
the midnight air remained undisturbed her tension began to wane.
Despite only a few scant minutes having
passed since Kitty had appeared at her bedroom, Isobel felt a lifetime older.
Her stalwart maid had taken a considerable
risk upon herself to offer her mistress the opportunity to escape the harsh
cruelty of her Uncle and take hold of our own future.
Dear Kitty, who was now strapped, battered
and bruised, to a hard wooden chair, as Isobel had been, a prisoner into the
room behind her.
Isobel shook her head
remorsefully as she considered the past few minutes where her life had yet
again taken a rather astonishing twist.
“
His
man servant was boasting just this
Eve’ that ye be gone in the morning to be wed and taken off his hands.”
Contempt laced Kitty’s voice. “He has sold
you miss, to one of his old crones
if’n
you
please!
A Bertram
DeLisle
,
I think he said.
If you refuse to go
with ‘
im
on the morrow, you know what will
happen!”
She knew exactly
what would happen; Isobel thought as she shuddered against a wave of terrified
revulsion.
The same thing that had
happened every single time her Uncle got into one of his rages.
The bruising was deep and plenty; the cuts
raw and painful.
Isobel knew that Kitty
would not be allowed up to tend to her battered flesh afterwards.
She also knew her Uncles rants had become
increasingly ferocious until of late Isobel had begun to fear she could
actually survive his next ‘lesson’.
“Please mistress
you must leave tonight!
Now!
You have to
do
this!”
Kitty had pled
with a voice that although kept low for fear of discovery, lost not of its
urgent insistence.
Isobel nodded
jerkily in agreement, her mind unable to focus on anything as the possibilities
began to unravel before her in a confusing jumble.
She couldn’t absorb the import of Kitty’s
outrageous suggestion.
Was it really
that simple?
Her hands shook with a
mixture of giddy elation and sickening nerves as she considered the enormity of
what she was about to do.
Could she
really take the branch of freedom that was being so readily offered to
her?
Apart from her Uncle and her Aunt
Elspeth, there was only a handful of surviving family members living miles
away.
It felt as though over the course
of the past few years she had buried most, if not all of those that were
nearest and dearest to her.
With no
protector or guardian likely to come forward and challenge her Uncle’s claim to
guardianship, Isobel was well and truly stuck in the daily hell she had been
cruelly drawn
into since her
brother’s death.
The only man besides
her brother she had considered someone she could trust had proven to be as
duplicitous as her conniving Uncle downstairs.
She had given
her heart and body to Dominic Carpenter, Lord
Tavistock
oh so
foolishly.
Despite his initial
reluctance, he had taken everything she had innocently offered before promptly
leaving her to walk up the aisle with another woman.
If gossip was indeed accurate, he had wedded
his new wife within days of leaving Isobel and was already in the process of
setting up his nursery!