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Carossan sat where she had sat on and off for the last two hundred years. With the coming of what they now called the Industrial Revolution and the massive influx of people into the towns, she was always surprised and joyfully relieved that this place remained untouched. Only three times in the last century had she been able to come here, but it was becoming easier as England shrank with the railway's expansion.
On the edge of the Cotswolds, in the lush pastures of sheep country, the high tower Carossan sat beneath overlooked an expanse of green divided into uneven shapes by long hedgerows. The town of Broadway was barely visible in the valley, and the steep winding highway of Fish Hill could be glimpsed as it descended into the town.
Carossan tried vainly to visualise Thomas' face. She could not remember it with any certainty, though sometimes in dreams her memory brought him forth. But beneath the tower she could feel him, and knew that she alone now understood its purpose.
The local people called it the Broadway Folly. They did not know why it had been built, though all manner of tales had accumulated around it, romantic fables and mundane stories of madness. The fifty foot tower of golden Cotswold stone was like a finger pointing to heaven, and it was here, before it was ever built that Carossan had told Thomas what had befallen her.
She and Thomas of Broadway had fallen in love at one of the season's many gentry balls. Summer was an endless succession of dinners and dances, where the business of sheep and wool was relegated to the smoke filled drawing rooms while the much more serious affair of socializing took place in the large, chandeliered ballrooms. The evenings were light until nine or ten and for the young daughters of the gentry class they were nights of freedom. Although chaperoned by ugly, graceless aunts whose own lives were already bitter, the girls always found ways to deceive their matronly escorts.
Throughout the summer of 1703 Thomas and Carossan courted each other. The many layers of crinoline and cotton were no barrier on the warm nights, and Carossan found herself pregnant and expecting to be married.
She had never paid any attention to her father's business affairs, her brother being groomed to take the reins. She was a decoration in her fathers empire, and she had naively forgotten that in his eyes she had no will of her own.
In her father's study Thomas had asked for Carossan's hand in marriage, only to be clapped on the back, offered a snifter of brandy and told she would be marrying somebody else, that it had been arranged a long time ago and he must have forgotten to tell her.
A frantic Carossan burst into the study after Thomas' departure hoping that the news of her pregnancy would alter her father's plans, but after a long and shattering fight they were only accelerated, and she found herself engaged to be married in one week to a man she had never liked, who was sixty years old and rumoured to have beaten his previous wife to death.