She called him Beast and they were never apart. He attended her to lessons and on Sundays sat beneath the elm in the churchyard and waited for her. But most days they spent in the woods and the fields, running and swimming and laughing. They were deliriously happy, and always Ravenna knew he was too strong, too large, and too fierce to ever be hurt by anybody, and too loyal to ever leave her.
On rainy days, the stable, smelling of straw and animals and damp warmth, became their home. Ravenna watched the old groom treat a sore hoof with a poultice of milk, wax, and wool. The next time he allowed her to do it. Then he told her how to recognize colic and how in the winter good foraging and warm water were better at preventing it than bran mash. In the winter when the Gypsies camped by the squire’s wood, Taliesin—whom she always wished the Reverend would adopt too so that he could be her brother—would take her to the horse corrals and teach her even more about hooves and colic and whatnot.
Then Eleanor fell ill. While Papa fretted and Arabella cooked and sewed and did all the tasks about the house that must be done, Ravenna learned from the doctor how to pour a dose of laudanum, how to prepare a steaming linen to set across Ellie’s chest, and how to boil licorice root and distill it into tea. In time Eleanor improved, and Ravenna began to follow the doctor on his other calls. At dinner each night she would tell Papa all that she had learned, and he would pat her on the head and call her a good-hearted puss.
When Arabella was seventeen she left to teach the children at the squire’s house, but returned only eight months later. After that, Papa told Ravenna she must not wander about the countryside alone.
“Young ladies must behave modestly,” he said with a worried glance at Beast sprawled out before the hearth.
“But Papa—”
“Obey me, Ravenna. I have allowed you too much freedom and you have had no mother to teach you the modesty your sister Eleanor has through her own nature and Arabella has learned at school. If you do not alter your habits, I will send you to school too.”
Ravenna had no intention of returning to the world of locked doors and switches. “Do not send me away, Papa. I will obey.” Confining her escapes to the stable, she strayed no farther. She showed her father that she could be as tame as her eldest sister while inside she suffocated.
Upon her sixteenth birthday she walked to the village and posted a letter to an employment agency in London. A month later she received a reply, and six months later an offer.
“I am going, Papa,” she said, hand clutched around the handle of a small traveling case. With relief, it seemed, he gave her his blessing. She went to the stable and fed an extra biscuit to the horse, scrubbed her knuckles over the barn cat’s brow, and then with Beast at her side set off on foot.
Eleanor ran after her and wrapped her in a tight embrace. “You cannot escape me, sister. No matter where you hide, I will find you.” Eleanor had never regained the bloom in her cheek or softness of form that had made her pretty before she’d fallen ill. But her arms were strong and her hazel eyes resolute.
Ravenna pulled away. “That suits me, for I would never wish to escape you. And at Shelton Grange I will be closer to Bella in London.”
“But what do you know of these men?”
“What the employment agency and their own letter told me.” That their house was large, their park vast, and their collection of twelve dogs, two exotic birds, and one house pig too much for them to manage without the assistance of a person of youth and vigor.
“Write to me often.”
Ravenna did not promise; her penmanship was poor. Instead she bussed her sister on the cheek and left her standing in the middle of the road, silhouetted by the gray stone of their father’s church.
Her employers were not pleased to discover that the “R. Caulfield” of her letters was not a young man.
“Impossible,” Sir Beverley Clark said with an implacably sanguine regard. Within moments of standing in his drawing room furnished with masculine comfort, Ravenna saw that although his friend, Mr. Pettigrew, was considerably more gregarious, in this house Sir Beverley was master. Resting a well-manicured hand on the top of the head of the wolfhound standing beside him, he told her, “I will not allow a young lady to reside at Shelton Grange.”
“I haven’t any designs upon you,” she said, looking up from the cluster of pugs licking her fingers and chewing her hem to his handsome face, then to Mr. Pettigrew’s round, rosy cheeks. “While you are clearly quite wealthy, you are both much older than my father, and anyway I don’t ever intend to marry so that puts period to that concern. I merely want to care for your animals, as agreed upon in our letters.”
A twinkle lit Mr. Pettigrew’s cloverleaf eyes. “Well, that is a relief, to be sure.” His voice was as merry as his smile, his hair probably yellow once but now creamy white. “But, m’dear, what Sir Beverley is saying is that it is unsuitable for you to live with two gentlemen who are unrelated to you.”
“Then you must adopt me.” She set down her traveling bag beside Beast who sat quite properly by her side, as though he understood the gravity of the moment. “I give you leave. My father is not my real father anyway, and I don’t think he would mind it as long as you do not beat me or otherwise mistreat me.”
Sir Beverley’s eyes like clear rain studied her. “From what are you running, Miss Caulfield?”
“Prison.”
Mr. Pettigrew’s brows shot up. “We’ve a fugitive in the house, Bev. Whatever shall we do with her?”
For the first time, the hint of tolerant compassion that Ravenna would grow to love ticked up the corner of Sir Beverley’s mouth. “Hide her from the law, I daresay.”
She spent her days brushing out the shaggy coats of three wolfhounds, clipping the nails of nine pugs, and laboring over letters to experts asking for advice on macaws and parrots. She made friends with Sir Beverley’s coachman, a one-legged veteran of the war who marveled at her ease with four-legged creatures and took up her instruction where Taliesin had left off.
Though he enjoyed the comforts of Shelton Grange above all, Sir Beverley liked to travel to entertainments, and to live in grand style upon those journeys. Mr. Pettigrew, whose house was only five miles distant but who liked Shelton Grange better, always accompanied him. While they were gone, Ravenna remained at home with Beast and their menagerie, enjoying the solitude of the lake and woods and fields and the house.
When they were in residence at Shelton Grange, Sir Beverley and Mr. Pettigrew liked to coddle her, like the first time she assisted Sir Beverley’s tenant farmers during the lambing and afterward walked about in a daze with purple circles beneath her eyes. Mr. Pettigrew mixed up a batch of his special recipe for recovering from excessive debauchery, and Sir Beverley read to her aloud from A Treatise on Veterinary Medicine. Privately Ravenna took this solicitude to heart, while to their faces she teased them, telling them they were treating her as though she were an infant and they her nurses. They seemed to like that. She called them “the nannies” and they called her their “young miss.”
For six years Ravenna was deeply happy.
Then Arabella married a duke and Sir Beverley told Ravenna that she must begin to make plans to depart Shelton Grange, for he could not employ a duchess’s sister, no matter how fond they all were of her. One morning not long after that, Beast did not wake up, and Ravenna understood that Paradise was only a dream invented by pious men to fool everyone.