No Place For A Lady: A sweeping wartime romance full of courage and passion
Praise for Gill Paul: ‘A cleverly crafted novel and an enthralling story… A triumph.’ DINAH JEFFERIES ‘Gripping, romantic and evocative of its time.’ LULU TAYLOR The year is 1854, and Britain is in the grip of a gruesome war. Dorothea Gray has not seen her little sister Lucy since she eloped with the handsome Captain Charlie Harvington and set sail for the Crimea.Now, as the war worsens and the battlefields darken with blood, Dorothea must risk everything to find her sister and join Florence Nightingale in the Crimean hospitals, nursing the injured soldiers back to health. But the young Lucy is fighting her own battles, and not everyone wants to be found…Against the backdrop of one of history’s most heartbreaking wars, can these two sisters find their way back to each other? Or will tragedy intervene?A spellbinding tale of courage, adventure and true love from the bestselling author of The Secret Wife.
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GILL PAUL
NO PLACE FOR A LADY
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © Gill Paul 2015
Cover Design © Lisa Horton 2015
Gill Paul asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008102128
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008102135
Version: 2018-06-05
For my brother Gray and sister Fo, who mean the world to me.
25th October 1854
Mrs Lucy Harvington stands shivering on a hilltop near the coast of Crimea, watching armies massed for battle below, waiting to find out if her husband will die today. Charlie is somewhere in the group to the far left: she has overheard Lord Raglan pointing out the Light Brigade when giving an order and she peers in the direction he indicated to see indistinct figures on horseback, cold sunlight glinting on the steel of their bayonets. All around she can see lines of men standing poised, waiting for the order to rush forward and try to kill each other – men who are sons, nephews, husbands and fathers, even grandfathers. She can hear the impatient whinny of horses and the squawk of a bird high above. It sounds like a warning.
Suddenly it seems incomprehensible that she should find herself in such a situation. In less than a year her entire fortune has turned on its head: she’s gone from being a young lady of just seventeen years who lived at home with her father and older sister, to being the wife of an army captain who has followed her husband to war in a remote, inhospitable land. She still can’t quite believe the change in her circumstances. In London she has a wide circle of friends and is used to attending balls and soirées wearing fashionable new gowns and the latest hairstyles. Now she has been wearing the same gown for almost a week without the opportunity to wash, her cloak is smeared in mud and her hair hangs in matted coils. She spends most of her time alone while Charlie is out in the field. She is cold, her clothes are damp – they never seem to dry completely – and she is very, very scared.
But her fate has been sealed since that first unforgettable meeting with Charlie Harvington, the beginning of a chain of circumstances that had led her to this godforsaken hillside.
It was a dull November day in 1853, when London was thick with sooty fog and the stench of the Thames. Lucy had called upon the Pendleburys, old friends of her parents, in the hope of seeing their son Henry, whom she knew was home on leave from the army. They’d enjoyed a brief flirtation during his last leave and she was curious to see where it might lead. Unfortunately, Henry was absent and she had to make conversation with his mother and father, a rather staid couple. Once they had run through the usual topics – the weather, plans for the festive season, health of respective family members – Lucy offered to play the pianoforte and sing for them, simply to pass the time until she could decently make her excuses and leave.
