Chapter ThreeSerena woke early in the small oak bed that she had slept in since she was a child.
The light was coming through the curtains revealing to her the familiar outlines of the room that had once been her nursery and which she still preferred for her bedroom despite the fact that she could, had she wished, have slept in one of the bigger and grander rooms of the house.
She had loved her nursery as a child and it had come, as the years passed by, to afford her a refuge, a place where she could escape from the cares and troubles of trying to run a household without money, from the grumbles of the old servants and even from her ever- increasing anxiety about her father.
Her mother had died when she was nine years old. Serena had loved her dearly, but Lady Staverley had suffered fro
