The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton by Miranda Neville Page A

to walk all day.”
    Then her face changed. Her mobile features registered every shift in emotion, though he couldn’t always interpret them. “I forgot. She said it’s the food of our home that gives us strength. Indians like to eat food from home, even when they travel.”
    “Is India your home?”
    “I was born there and lived there most of my life,” she said. “But I don’t think I really belonged. How could I? How could any English? It isn’t our country.”
    “I don’t think that fact troubles the East India Company, or the British goverent.”
    “No. In fact many of the English try and build their own little corners of England on Indian soil. From what my father told me, their efforts can be quite comical, given the climate.”
    “You didn’t live like that?”
    “After we moved from Madras my father’s situation was obscure. We saw very few English.”
    He wanted to probe further but something told him, not for the first time, that she found the topic of her life there distressing. She had, after all, lost both her parents in that distant land. “Where is home, then?” he asked.
    “Not Lincolnshire. I only spent a few weeks at my uncle’s house and since he died there’s nothing for me there. I’ve been in Yorkshire for a year so it must be home.” She shook off the air of melancholy that had settled on her when they spoke of her past. “Splendid. I’ve had half a fish and a cup of water. I should be ready to walk ten or twenty miles today.”
    “It won’t do me much good. I’ll have to work hard to keep up with you. I’d have to have brought something from Cornwall, wouldn’t I?”
    For a moment he thought she was going to argue with him. That one of her expressions he knew, because he’d seen it before. Instead she shrugged. “So you would. Perhaps you could eat those boots.”
    Idiot . Celia had been about to contradict him, tell him that he was at home. For as she spoke she remembered something about Mr. Tarquin Compton. The Duchess of Amesbury had commended him to her London chaperone with the information that his estates were in Yorkshire, not far from the duke’s secondary residence. She’d implied that the duke’s sister had made something of a misalliance when she’d wed Mr. Compton’s father. At the time Celia had found it amusing that the duchess was apparently the only person in London to speak of the reigning dandy with what bordered on contempt. Of course the duchess hardly accorded her, Celia, much respect, either. But that was to be expected. Anyway, the fact that the Duchess of Amesbury despised her nephew wasn’t relevant. What mattered was that her companion was a Yorkshireman, unlike any inhabitant of the doughty county she’d ever met, but nonetheless a local. He must have been visiting his lands when he was robbed.
    Perhaps they were even on his lands. The first person they met might recognize him and her lies would be exposed. She watched him stand and survey the rolling moorland, fearing every second he would recognize a landmark and come to his senses. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. As he’d predicted, dark bristles covered his jaw. She found the disheveled, faintly disreputable appearance far more attractive than the sleek perfection of his other self.
    “I believe I see smoke,” he said. “Some distance off, but the air is so clear now I don’t think it’s mist. There must be a house or a village over that rise.”
    With mixed feelings and because there was, after all, nothing else to do, Celia agreed they should head in that direction. Perhaps she faced exposure the other side of the hill, but why expect the worst? They might find a square meal and directions to her destination.
    C ivilization at last!
    Of a kind. It wasn’t a village, or even much of a hamlet: a handful of small gritstone houses nestled in a shallow vale, a shepherding community judging by the white blobs that dotted the surrounding fields. There was no inn and it was likely