Hannah woke groggily, to find the man shaking her shoulder. She stared blearily up at him: some faint light had entered the cabin, and she could now discern his silhouette from the faint grey shadows of the barn behind.

"I think it's morning."

Clawing at the sacks, she prised herself out of the gap into which she had fallen during the night. The man stepped back as she eased herself onto the floor. Her ankles and knees seemed to have frosted over in her sleep. Gingerly, she tried to stretch, and collapsed back on the sacks with a yelp as her calf began to cramp.

"Everything hurts!"

"But you don't have a hangover," the man said, half-triumphantly. "Come on. Up."

Hannah did not get up. Leaving her to her misery, the man went to the door and opened it, allowing in a soft shaft of greyish light and a fall of snow. He went out over the snow, and Hannah's curiosity impelled her to crawl off the sacks and hobble after him.

It was dawn, and the world was blanketed in white beneath a haze of pink clouds, burning bright at the horizon. The man was staring into the burning bright spot, his hands in his pockets, his back to Hannah. Hannah crunched forward through the snow and breathed in the prickling, chill morning air.

"Oh! Isn't it pretty!?"

The man turned to her. For the first time, there was enough light for her to see his face. She found she liked it. It was a young, tanned face, framed by an unkempt mess of dark hair. The features were bony and rather heavy, but he was saved any severity of appearance the smile in his dark eyes, which she suspected might be a constant feature. As she looked, his mouth began to smile too, and he laughed.

"Well you're pretty too. But I had an idea you would be."

Hannah looked away shyly.

"There's not more than a foot of snow, but it'll put paid to walking far. I live nearby. I think closer than anyone else. Come with me, and I'll see to it that you're taken safely home."

"Oh no!" Hannah thought of her furious father, with a sinking feeling in her stomach. "Really, I can't go home. I won't."

"But where else can you go?" The man gestured at the sleeping white landscape around them. "It's impossible to get to Bath, or London, or anywhere else in this. Even with a carriage, the roads are likely unusable until tomorrow. And you can't walk!"

"Yes. I can. I will." Obstinately, Hannah gathered the folds of her pelisse around her, and marched off over the snow in the direction of the road. It was a slow march, perhaps even a waddle, because the snow reached half-way up her calves, but if it was a waddle it was an imperious one.

The man, without trying to persuade her, walked after her. His legs being longer than hers, her hurrying only had the effect of exhausting her, as all he had to do was lengthen his stride to keep up.

"Don't follow me."

"I must."

"No. You must leave me. If you won't help-" She was stopped for a moment by a wooden fence, and the necessity of climbing it. Hovering on the lip, she said severely, "If you won't help, leave."

"Help? But that's why I'm following!"

"But you won't help me get to Bath."

"No. That wouldn't be helping."

"Then – then I don't need you to follow me. Good bye, Sir."

Hannah jumped from her perch on the fence. But on the other side, banked up against the fence, the snow had gathered deceptively into a drift. Hannah sunk down into it with a scream. Her feet hit something, but not something solid enough, and she lost her balance and went down on her back in a cloud of enveloping snow.

She struggled, flailing her limbs, to pull herself out of it. A hand latched onto her own, and pulled hard. She surfaced, spitting snow from her mouth. The man was leaning over the fence, and it was his hand that had grabbed hers.

"You're not hurt are you?"

"No." Tears blurred Hannah's vision. "Not hurt."

The man bit his lip. He began to laugh.

"Oh don't, don't," Hannah begged, letting her tears fall. "It's not fair – you never had a horrid father like mine! I can't – I can't go back. And I won't marry Daniel Byrd."

"No. No it's not fair." He bit back his laughter. "It's not."

Hannah bowed her head and brushed snow from her pelisse. The snow had gotten under her clothes when she fell and was beginning to melt into her skirt, against her legs, and into her collarbones. She shivered.

"Nothing I can say ever makes father listen."

"Nothing I can say makes you listen." The corners of the man's mouth twitched. "But you're wet all through, and my home is closest. Come with me, and I'll find you something dry."

"But you'll send me home." Again, her eyes filled with tears. "You will."

"Well – dam'me – I won't," he promised rashly. "I've got a horse and carriage, and when the roads are safe, I'll send you anywhere you want to go."

She blinked back the tears. "Really?"

"Really." He brushed a clump of snow from her shoulders. "I can't see what else I can do. You've out-stubborned me. If I don't, you'll tramp across the snow, fall into a million drifts, and you won't even let me be there to pull you out of any of them."

"No. I won't." Hannah considered it. A suspicion arose in her mind that a gentlemanly stranger might just, in fact, lure an innocent lass back to his castle and seduce her. In one of her favourite novels, it certainly would have been the case. But she was beginning to grow suspicious of novels. They didn't seem to leave room for men like the one in front of her, who followed the villainous pursuits of drinking and swearing and wearing his clothes and hair dishevelled, but had nothing of the villain about his eyes or smile.

"Alright," she decided. "I'll go with you. But you'd better mean it. If you're going to change your mind when we get there, or trick me, then you might as well tell me now. Unless you're going to carry me kicking and screaming, I won't go back to my parents." She set her jaw. "And I'll kick and scream all the way."

"I promise. Wherever you want to go."

"That's alright then," Hannah said graciously, as though conferring a favour on him. "Where is home?"

"Back that way."

He helped her climb the fence again and they strode off back past the shed. Hannah hopped after him, stepping in the tracks he left in the snow to avoid having to slough through it herself. Her damp skirts slapped and dragged at her ankles. When the man reached the crest of the hill, he had to stop and wait for her to catch up.

There were more fields on the other side of the hill, walled by clumps of dark twiggy shrubs and hedges, sloping westwards until they terminated at a black-wooded ridge. At the bottom of this shallow valley, sheltered from the wind, was a cluster of black-boughed trees that must have just been hiding the house from which two tall grey chimneys rose.

"My house is among that copse."

"It's miles away."

"Not more than two. And easier once we hit the trees. There shouldn't be as much snow on the ground in the woods." He gave her a considerate glance. "Will it help if you take my arm?"

"It helps if you go first and make a path. The snow's too deep."

"Then at least give me your reticule, and I'll put it in my pocket."

Hannah gave her snow-drenched, bedraggled reticule to the man, who folded it carefully away in the pocket of his greatcoat, and they moved on again, the man taking care to tramp down heavily in the snow. Hannah picked her way after him, holding up her skirts. The snow was deep enough, and the ground beneath it rough enough, that there was less conversation than panting. They climbed one fence, and crossed a field before the man started to talk. He was rather breathless.

"I can't imagine we'll be doing any travelling today. The snow's too deep on the roads, and we'll both be done in anyway."

"I don't like waiting."

"I thought you wouldn't." There was something in the man's voice that made Hannah think he was laughing at her. "What concerns me is what I'm going to do with you today. It's one thing to spend the night with you in a barn, when we don't have anywhere else to go. It's another if I keep you alone with me when there are other options."

Hannah was not unaware of the problem posed there. "Don't you have a sister, or a wife?"

"Not... exactly."

"Not exactly." Hannah repeated it carefully as she navigated around a clump of frosted brambles at the edge of a field. "What does that mean?"

"I have no sister, but I might be engaged," the man said, with a strange carelessness. "I'm not really sure. Last night may have scotched it. It scotched something."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"I'm not sorry." The man kicked a fallen branch out of the way and ploughed on over the snow. "Suffice to say, there is no duenna at home for you, excepting housekeepers and chambermaids. I'll pass you into their hands, and make the right kind of excuses, which might end up being something close to the truth. But to keep you in my house for the night, then to travel with you, without a chaperone..."

"We have a day to find one. Would your housekeeper-"

"No." The man was very firm. "I'm afraid she's going to be very fierce with both of us when we arrive - and she'll be right." He stopped a moment and turned back to look pointedly at Hannah's damp, dirty hems. "We've made rather a mess of ourselves."

Hannah blushed for the both of them.

"Still," said the man, walking on again. They were now in a big flat field with little crops of trees and shrubs through it - probably a livestock field. "I think I'll be able to persuade people on my end that all's well that end's well - I don't think your people will be so pleased, when they receive a letter from you via Bath post."

Hannah clenched her numb toes inside their soaked boots and said nothing. The man, occupied with forging ahead through the snow, didn't seem to notice her discomfort. The further they walked, the tireder and more uncomfortable Hannah felt. It wasn't just the snow. She kept thinking of her mother and father. Her father would be angry of course, and her mother would cry. But there wasn't any other way to have done things. Their happiness in her obedience would have come at the cost of Hannah's own. But even disobedient, even justifying her disobedience, Hannah found herself somehow unhappy.

Some silent half-hour later, they arrived at the brick wall of a ha-ha, surrounded by a drift of snow. A wood of trees loomed beyond. The man waited while Hannah caught up. She'd been going slower and slower behind him, and even though her feet had gone numb long ago, she'd discovered that it didn't make them feel any less tired.

"I'll get up first, and then help you. Can you do it? The gate's round the other side and it's too far to trek."

She sighed limply. "I suppose."

"You're a real square to have come so far."

"Am I?" For a moment her spirits rose. "I keep thinking I'm a fool for ever leaving."

"I think you're both." The creases under his eyes deepened as he smiled. "I rather like your foolishness too."

"I'm on cold terms with it myself right now."

"So if I'm going to persuade you to go home, now is the time?"

"Never is the time." A note of panic crept into her voice. "I can't go back. I must keep going."

He patted her shoulder. "Then let's keep going. Not far now."

He floundered through the drift, hoisted himself up onto the wall, and scrambled over the lip. Getting Hannah up was then an exercise in strength and indignity. The strength was mostly on the man's part, and the indignity not wholly on Hannah's. At the top, he discreetly removed his hands from where they had slipped, and she wiped the cold impression of his coat collar from her cheek. Beneath his tan, his cheeks were tinged pink.

But after that, it was almost easy. The snow was shallower under the trees, and without the summer undergrowth, the wood-floor was almost flat. They emerged after a while onto a road between the trees, where there was space to walk abreast, and the man held out his arm for her. She took it, not because she really needed it now, but because she found it pleasant to hold.

"I was just thinking," he said. "Do you like eggs for breakfast?"

"At least half a dozen." Her eyes went wide. "You don't have chocolate, do you?"

"I think we might. Though it's coffee I'm dreaming of. And baked ham - if I can persuade the housekeeper to forgive me. It does make one hungry, doesn't it?"

"I've never been so hungry in my life."

The man was silent and thoughtful a moment. "Do you know the diet of an average governess?"

"I don't have to be a governess." She tossed her head. "Or I'll be a rich one."

"A rich governess, spending all her pay on butter and eggs and chocolate?"

Hannah met his eye challengingly. "A dozen eggs. And ham. And chocolate."

He only laughed and pulled her arm closer in his.

It was at that moment that Hannah realized, after all that happened, she had never thought to ask him his name.

"Why, do you know, we never introduced ourselves!"

"Didn't we? I suppose we didn't. It's just through here."

Though the man's arm was still firmly around hers, he seemed to have no real interest in her name. Hannah was disappointed. She had started to hope that the man was not so ungentlemanly as he had first appeared that night; that there might be the chance to forge an acquaintance that her father would disapprove only just enough to make the more exciting.

The man released her arm to open a wooden farm gate. There was a stone building just ahead, and Hannah's heart rose at the thought of a soft chair, a warm fire, and boiled eggs. But when she trotted around the corner of the building she realized, with some disappointment, that it was not a cottage after all. The closed barn doors and the faint knicker of horses from within told that it was only a stable - a very large one.

"Why - you must be very wealthy." She turned to him in surprise. "I thought you were-"

"I'm not," the man said hastily. "Not yet, anyway."

But across the snowy lawn, between the trunks of winter-bony oaks, Hannah could see the real house. It was a large house. It was the house whose chimneys she had seen nearly two miles away. It was a house she recognized from its owner's vainglorious description of eighty-two windows and Grecian elegance.

It was Sir Byrd's house.

"You tricked me!" She turned furiously to the man. "You lied! You said you'd help me and you took me straight to Sir Byrd!"

"No - wait, Miss Templeton."

But Hannah didn't wait. She turned on her heel and ran towards the woods. She didn't know where she was going, or how she would even get there, but she knew she wasn't staying.

It didn't take more than a few yards for the man to catch her by the arm. She stopped, but refused to face him.

"You tricked me," she repeated, her voice shaking. "Let me go. I told you what I'd do if you lied."

"No – No, I didn't trick you. And I didn't lie. This is my house. This is my stable. I am Daniel Byrd."

Hannah felt suddenly faint. She did not think it was from hunger. "What." She stared at him in disbelief. "I - I beg your pardon?"

"I am Daniel Byrd." He released his grip on her arm. "And I didn't lie. I'll take you anywhere you wish to go. But – I hope you'll stay."