by Fiona Monroe
How would she herself feel, when the moment eventually came that she must shut the bedroom door and be alone with Mr. Carmichael on her own wedding night? Her mind went blank and closed down. It did not help that she could still not by any effort of imagination conjure up a picture of his face.
"God, this place is going to be dull as the tomb without Ross to talk with, or Caroline running around making a racket," said Sir Duncan abruptly. "Think I'll clear out to town for a few days, round up some fellows for the ceilidh while I'm there."
Catriona was dismayed. For a few moments, she was almost overwhelmed by an unreasoning disappointment; and then, she was angry with herself that she should care that he was going. A little more thought, and she realised that she was hurt that he did not consider her sufficiently interesting to mitigate the dullness of Lochlannan now that his sister and his friend were gone.
And after all, why should he? It had been ridiculous of her to begin to think that she was anything to him, that he thought of her seriously in any way. Just because he had bid her stay for her own safety, and corrected her for her own good, it did not mean that he cared anything about her; he had merely been doing his duty as her legal guardian. And certainly, just because he had held her close and kissed her brow and touched her bosom, it meant nothing other than he was a bad and dangerous man. How many other women had he fondled in that way?
It was as well he was going away.
Cruikshank came in with a silver platter bearing the post, and glided to the head of the table with Sir Duncan's usual pile of letters. Sir Duncan glanced at the addresses of each then tossed them aside without opening them. Catriona was so occupied in watching this, and wondering vaguely how he could be so completely careless of his correspondence—and whether any were from the woman whose letter she had found in his bureau—that she failed to realise at first that Cruikshank was bending respectfully at her own elbow.
On the outstretched tray was a letter addressed to her.
She snatched it up with a nod, and saw with a lurch of fright that the handwriting was Mr. Carmichael's. It had not occurred to her that he would be so bold as to write to her openly, but perhaps he had not realised that the morning post was distributed in full view of whoever happened to be at the breakfast table. She made as good a show as she could of putting the letter casually to one side, unopened, but she was sure that Sir Duncan had glanced at her at least once. As soon as she could, she escaped.
She left her breakfast plate untouched.
Catriona did not feel any better when she fled with her letter to the privacy of her room, and found Mackenzie there, neatly folding away some of her new gowns. She paused in her task to curtsy as Catriona halted in surprise.
"What are you doing here?" said Catriona, ungraciously enough.
"If you please, ma'am, I'm to be your maid."
"But you are Miss Buccleuch's maid. Mrs. Ross, I should say."
"Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am. Mrs. Ross said I might stay on at Lochlannan, ma'am. She was kind enough to ask me whether I should rather go with her to her new home, or stay here."
And evidently, the girl had chosen to stay. It was possible that she knew how much that Caroline disliked her, and was glad to be given the opportunity to resign her position as her lady's maid. It was also of course possible that the girl wanted to remain at Lochlannan for an entirely different reason. Catriona felt cold.
Perhaps disconcerted by her new mistress's unfriendly stare, Mackenzie turned back to smoothing out the muslin of a fine evening gown. "The master said that I should be your maid from now on, ma'am. I thought he would have told you."
"No. He did not."
She snatched up her shawl and, as afterthought, a book. Tucking the still-unopened letter inside, she escaped to the grounds.
She was heading for the rose garden when she spotted, over near the stables, Sir Duncan mounting his horse with two or three grooms in attendance. She wondered if he was leaving directly, and if he intended to go on horseback all the way to Edinburgh. The fact that a second horse was being saddled alongside him, presumably for a servant, did suggest that he was preparing for a journey.
She turned away towards the rose garden, determined not to betray any interest in his movements and anxious to avoid drawing any attention to herself. Once she was safely alone within its hedge walls, she turned her attention to the letter.
There it was, the bold, dashed-off address in his untidy handwriting: Miss Catriona Dunbar, Lochlannan Castle, Inverness-shire. The very shape and slope of the letters forming her own name had once always given her a little flutter every time she saw it on the outside of an envelope, though the note within was always somewhat disappointing. 'Meet at the merket cross at five today', or perhaps 'Lecture cancelled, see you Saturday'. She broke the seal and unfolded the paper.
Only the inner part of the envelope was written upon, and that sparsely.
Dear Catriona
Sorry it has taken me some weeks to reply, but you know how things are at the Medical School. I have been earning a few shillings a week helping out Dr. Sinclair in the pharmacy, cleaning bottles and mixing draughts and the like, and this is keeping me in bread and beer but depriving me of time to do much more than study and sleep. My uncle's allowance is late again and it's a cold fact that I would have starved these last two weeks without this extra work. But the long vacation starts next week, and I doubt the doctor will have need of my services over the summer.
Ach, when will this infernal grubbing in the gutter for pennies end? I am so heartily sick of it. It is hard to bend the mind to study, when I am in a constant worry about next month's rent and next week's dinners. God knows what I shall do over the summer. My mother wants me to visit home, but the journey is beyond my pocket. Besides, there is even less to eat there than there is here.
Thank God these troubles will be over when you come of age. It is a comfort to know that, but the road from now to then seems long and hard.
Your affectionate AC
Catriona read the short missive through three or four times as she paced amidst the roses. There would have been a time when this letter would have disappointed, even distressed her, but now she felt nothing beyond a faint irritation. Had he always been so preoccupied with his own concerns, that he would fill his first letter to her with complaints and make no enquiry after her, seem to have no interest in how she was faring in her new and very different life?
In truth, she thought, he had never talked about much other than himself and his own doings. She had always liked to listen, because he spoke wittily and well; he told lively stories of his professors at the Medical School, and the other students, and the patients they treated, and it all seemed so much more interesting than her own uneventful existence in Souter's Close. Now it occurred to her how seldom had ever encouraged her to tell him anything about her own affairs, how little time they had spent discussing her thoughts and feelings. It was always about him, and she had taken it for granted that it should be so.
Sir Duncan, in the short time they had known each other, had shown more interest in her and more concern for her. He may have chastised her, but at least that meant he cared enough to correct her misbehaviour. Mr. Carmichael would not have taken the trouble; if he was angry with her, he would simply disappear in a sulk for days at a time and punish her with silence and absence until she was desperate to beg forgiveness for an offence that was often not even made clear to her.
She wondered suddenly if he had been doing just that these last few weeks, if his long delay in replying had been in reproach for some fancied lack of warmth in her own letter. She wondered, indeed, if it had been fancied, for although she could not recall exactly what she had written to him she did remember struggling over the words. If he had been offended, however, she had entirely failed to notice his pointed silence. The truth was, she had hardly given him a thought since posting her letter.
She was so deep in thought, letter in one hand and book in the other, that she faile
d to notice the figure standing in the archway entrance to the rose garden until he spoke.
"You are lonely, Miss Dunbar, without my sister for a companion. I don't like to see you taking such a solitary ramble."
Startled, she tucked the letter back between the pages of her book. Sir Duncan was in his riding boots and greatcoat, and he was still holding a horsewhip. Evidently, he had leapt straight down from his horse to follow her into the garden.
After a moment to recover her self-possession, she said, "I have my book, sir. I am quite content, I assure you."
"Pff, books. Let me see. What is it?"
"It is—nothing that would interest you." She clutched the volume to her breast.
He continued to hold out his hand. "Come now, I know full well that all young ladies read sad trash. I doubt you're any different, for all your erudite pretentions. Let me guess, it's something set in a mouldering castle, ruled by a wicked count and beset by mountain bandits, with a heroine who was left an orphan as a baby, but who proves to be the count's rightful heiress?"
"You seem very well acquainted with such works, sir."
He threw back his head and laughed, then made a not-so-playful grab at the book. "I will see."
She had been momentarily disarmed by his laughter, and did not anticipate the attack; not soon enough to prevent him wrenching it from her fingers. The letter fell from its pages, and fluttered towards the gravel path. In a trice, he had snatched it up.
"Aha! I thought so." He glanced at the cover of the book, then examined the address on the letter.
Even in her alarm, Catriona fervently wished that the book had been anything other than volume one of a new novel, borrowed from Caroline, entitled The Curse of Blackthorne Abbey. "Sir," she said with as much heat and dignity as she could muster. "My letter. Please. That is my private correspondence. You are too much of a gentleman, surely, to read —"
"Did I not tell you quite plainly, Miss Dunbar, that I am no gentleman? Besides... you have no scruples yourself about such things, as I recall."
"Sir!"
"More to the point—you are my ward, and I won't have you conducting any correspondence under my roof that I do not approve. If this is merely a letter from a friend, why do you care if I glance at it?"
She could say nothing to this, but quailed as he turned the letter over.
"This is a man's hand," he said at once, his half-smile vanishing abruptly, then as he read the contents his frown deepened. "Who is this fool AC?" He pronounced the two letters scornfully, as if they were self-evidently absurd.
"Mr. Alistair Carmichael, sir. He is a student at the Medical School in Edinburgh."
"I gathered that much. And he is a near relation of yours, I take it, for you to be writing to one another? Hitherto unmentioned half-brother? Curiously concealed first cousin?"
He was mocking her, because of course he knew the answer. He knew she had no other relations, and that there was only one circumstance under which she could be corresponding with a young man. "We are engaged to be married, sir," she said steadily.
"The deuce you are." He thrust the letter back at her. "Why, the man is nothing more than a fortune hunter, he says as much right there."
"Sir, Mr. Carmichael and I have been engaged since last year, long before I learned about my inheritance —"
"Dissolve the engagement."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. This — Carmichael fellow is evidently in no position to marry anyone, and he is certainly not a fit match for you. What is he? The son of a clerk?"
"No! His father is a minister of the kirk in Perthshire." Assistant minister, but she did not volunteer the information.
"And you are the ward of the Laird of Lochlannan, with twenty thousand pounds. Dissolve the engagement."
"You must excuse me, Sir Duncan. I cannot do that, I will not do that. You cannot command me in such a matter. I am willing, very willing to obey you in any common way, but this — this is a question of honour, this is a promise given, and I —"
"I told you I did not like deceit!" he shouted.
"I... have not deceived you."
"Oh, spare me that, Miss Dunbar. You merely forgot to mention this engagement all these weeks? You pretend that you thought the information would be of no interest to me as your guardian? Deception by omission is lying all the same. Do you imagine you love the fellow?"
"Of course I do," she replied quickly.
"Have you lain with him?"
"No!"
"Then write to him today and send him packing. That is my final word on the matter, as your guardian."
Alight with fury, she faced him squarely. "I will do no such thing, sir. You do not have the right to demand it of me."
He seized hold of her, and for a wild, lurching moment she thought he might turn her over his knee right there and have at her with the riding crop. But instead, he pulled her hard against him and crushed his mouth to hers.
She was too surprised to struggle, and then she did not want to. Her senses swam as her lips parted willingly, tasting his hunger and then meeting it. It was a shock when he broke away, with a shrugging motion that felt like a shove. When she opened her eyes, he was already striding away towards the rose arch.
Heart thumping, breathless, she stood motionless and watched his retreating figure until he was beyond her sight. He did not look back.
Catriona could not compose herself for some considerable time. She walked about the rose garden for what may have been an hour, shivering despite the warmth of the morning, her head and heart in turmoil. Mr. Carmichael's letter was clutched mechanically in her fist, and she realised after a while that she had crumpled it in her agitation. Guiltily, she sat on the stone bench in the arbour at the far end of the garden and attempted to smooth it out as best she could against her skirt.
Dissolve the engagement.
She was not sure what affected her more: anger at Sir Duncan's unjustifiable demand, or the delicious shock of his sudden embrace. Her bottom lip was sore where she had cut it a little inside against her teeth, in the violence and urgency of their kiss. Even so, it had been quite unlike Mr. Carmichael's clumsy and unwelcome attempt to force his attentions on her. Of that, she remembered knocking her head and hating the feel of his tongue. When Sir Duncan kissed her she had not even noticed hurting her lip, so sweet and hot had been his hungry mouth.
She had been shaken by his fury. She had never seen him shouting before; he seemed given more to sarcasm and cold, controlled rage. It did nothing to change her conviction, however, that he had no right to order her to terminate her engagement and that she had no obligation to do so. Her only legal and moral duty was to remain under his protection until she came of age in two years' time, and that she had always had every intention of doing. What she did, whom she married after that time would be no business of his, and she could not in the meantime break faith with a man to whom she had been honourably betrothed for over a twelvemonth. It would be sheer hypocrisy and — yes — deceit to dissolve the engagement while she was Sir Duncan's ward just to please him, if she intended to marry Mr. Carmichael anyway when she came of age.
If she intended to marry Mr. Carmichael.
By the time she had left the rose garden and paced distractedly across the lawns to seek the cool stone interior of the castle, her heart was aching with a dreadful realisation that she hardly dared acknowledge to herself. She knew that she could not accept Sir Duncan even if he were to make her an offer, which he never would. But she also knew that she could not in good faith marry Mr. Carmichael, when she was in love with someone else.
It was exactly what she had counselled Caroline for weeks, and what had seemed to her so straightforward and obvious a course of action. Only now did she realise how very difficult her cousin's situation had been; how dreadful to face the reality of disappointing and injuring one man, for the sake of another who may never be hers.
She, Catriona, had to find the courage to be true to her own hea
rt.
Catriona waited a night and half a day before doing anything, although really her decision had been made as soon as she had acknowledged to herself the truth of her own feelings. Sir Duncan could not influence her, for he was gone as he had promised. He must have made straight for his saddled horse after leaving her in the rose garden, and galloped off down the glen.
She was left to the uncongenial company of the two older ladies, but this suited her perfectly well at this moment. She could not have held a serious, coherent conversation with anyone.
After a mostly sleepless night and another morning spent wandering around the grounds, trying to quieten the turmoil of her thoughts and in reality trying to muster her courage, she found herself kneeling on her bed with her writing case open upon the covers.
It had not yet been necessary to ask anyone at Lochlannan for writing supplies, for she had written only one letter since her arrival. Now, however, she feared she might run through the whole of her modest stock of paper in her many attempts at starting a letter to Mr. Carmichael without succeeding in writing anything that she could bear to send.
After two hours and some tears, she decided that her latest completed effort would have to serve the purpose, or she would never do this at all.
Dear Mr. Carmichael
Please forgive me for breaking this to you by letter, rather than in person as I would prefer. You well know the practical difficulties that make it all but impossible for us to meet, or I would not cause you pain without being present to offer you also whatever comfort I could.
Last spring, you did me the inestimable honour of offering me your hand in marriage. I was truly glad to receive your addresses, I honestly believed myself to love you then. I still think that had we been able to marry in a timely fashion, we might have made each other happy.
