“That is just what I have been asking myself every night,” the man called Charles replied. “It will be an agony beyond words, my darling, to leave you, but I have no alternative than to marry Arliva as her aunt wants me to.”
It was then that Arliva realised who was speaking.
It was a young man called Charles Walton whose mother had been one of her aunt’s bridesmaids and her greatest friend.
She had heard them talk before of the family estate that he had inherited from his father.
It had been doing pretty well until the Crimean War had taken a great number of men who were in the County Yeomanry into the British Army fighting the Russians and indeed the British casualties had been very high.
“I hate wars,” Arliva’s father had said at the time, “and it has been extremely poor diplomacy o
