Sold to a Laird

by Karen Ranney

  “Has there been any change?” Sarah asked.

  “Not since you saw her this morning, Lady Sarah.”

  There was more in Hester’s eyes, but Sarah looked away. Kindness was not what she wanted. She needed strength, the ability to carry on, to do as she must regardless of the circumstances. Her ancestors had done so—she needed that ability as well.

  “Go eat, Hester. I’ll stay with her.”

  “What about your own meal, Lady Sarah?”

  “I’ll have Cook prepare a tray.”

  “When will you eat?”

  She glanced at Hester. Her features were frozen in an implacable look of resolve. Hester was excessively nurturing, but she was also excessively stubborn.

  “I’ll eat, I promise,” she said.

  Hester left, murmuring something about people making promises they had no intention of keeping. Sarah ignored her, intent on her mother’s face.

  The faint light made Morna’s face appear gaunt, older than her years. For a moment, Sarah couldn’t see the woman she knew in the face illness had created. She closed her eyes and recalled earlier days, when her mother’s laughter had sparkled throughout Chavensworth.

  In that instant of time, she became nine years old again, swinging a picnic basket in her left hand, overjoyed with the thought of being able to eat her lunch beneath a tall oak tree on the hill overlooking the lavender fields. Never mind that it was only a few minutes from Chavensworth proper; her mother could make the hour or so an enchanted time. She would tell stories of her forbears, of a castle named Kilmarin, of pixies, brownies, and the Hag of Winter.

  “Will you never go back there again, Mother?” she’d asked once, on a day when her mother seemed particularly sad.

  “I shall never,” Morna said, but then she’d smiled.

  The child she’d been, perceptive and almost hurtfully honest, had known that her mother did not wish to discuss her home. So she hadn’t mentioned it again, and it never occurred to her until now, when Morna seemed inches from death.

  Had her mother ever wished to return to Scotland? Had she missed her own family, people Sarah had never met?

  That question might never be answered.

  The clouds, visible through the French windows, were swirling overhead, forming pendulous bellies darkening from soft gray to nearly black. As she watched, lightning flashed from one swollen cloud to another.

  When she was a little girl, she was afraid of thunderstorms, cowering in her bed whenever they came. A rainy spring only brought terror for her. Countless times, her mother had sat with her, trying to get her to smile. Morna told her one story after another, transforming the freakish sound of thunder to Thor’s hammer, God laughing, or a dozen other futile analogies that didn’t ease Sarah’s fears one whit.

  She had outgrown her childish fear and come to love storms, feeling curiously attuned to them, especially today, when the air hung heavy over Chavensworth, and the clouds dropped lower over the land.

  Softly, she stroked the back of her mother’s hand. Morna felt even colder today than she had the day before, as if she were dying by degrees.

  Sarah took a deep breath, wondering what she could tell her mother that wouldn’t worry her on the off chance that she truly could hear her. Chavensworth’s finances? Never as grim in Morna’s days of caring for the estate. Her marriage? What could she possibly divulge to her mother? That Douglas Eston was inciting her to abandon, and she’d never felt so depraved or excited. Perhaps it wasn’t Douglas’s fault at all but some flaw in her own nature. A flaw further magnified when she’d awakened this morning and been disappointed to find him gone.

  She stood, walked to the French windows, opened them, and left the room, closing the doors behind her. Before she had this room transformed into her mother’s sickroom, it had been the Summer Parlor, a room that looked out over the Greek Garden and a small brick patio just like the Duchess’s Suite on the floor above.

  She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked up at the sky. Did God truly live in the heavens? Or was He in every place and everything?

  The wind tossed her hair, and threatened the care with which Florie had arranged it. She felt like pulling every pin from her hair, throwing them on the ground, heedless and reckless, as if daring God and the coming storm.

  No one would call her feckless. No one would think of her as having a rebellious nature. If given an unattainable goal, she somehow attained it. If handed an unbearable circumstance, she nonetheless endured it. Lady Sarah coped.

  She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Hester opening the door.

  “Come in, Lady Sarah. It’s dangerous out there with the storm.”

  She didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to be safe. Besides, nothing was truly safe anywhere, was it? She had gone to London, to her father’s home, and found herself married because of it. She had come home to Chavensworth, and her mother was dying within its walls. Where was the safety?

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, but had to raise her voice over the sound of the wind. “I just need some air.”

  Hester looked doubtful, but she’d had enough of Hester’s care. Let Hester dole out her compassion to her mother. The entire world should weep because this sweet and generous soul was dying.

  She turned away and began to walk, leaving the patio and its hedge border, down past the rose garden and the intricate ornamental garden crafted from boxwoods. The clouds lowered still farther, the wind picked up, gusts drifting beneath her skirt, billowing the fabric into a perfect circle.

  How immodest.

  She didn’t care. How very odd was that? She always cared. She was very decorous in her appearance at all times, even around Chavensworth, even when she was ill. At those infrequent times when she didn’t leave her bed, she insisted that her face be washed and her hair brushed and arranged in a pleasing manner.

  She had never been abandoned.

  Nothing Douglas had done the night before had been without her willing participation. Still and all, it seemed so hideously decadent and improper that she warmed even now thinking of it. He had touched her with silken fingers and whispered words, and her entire body had curled around him like a new leaf. She was a virgin, but after last night she considered herself a little more knowledgeable. If not about passion itself, then about her reaction to it.

  Sarah entered the Greek Garden. She’d learned more about the opposite sex studying those statues than in her two seasons in London. When she’d been a child, her mother had put skirts on two or three of them, but Sarah had waited until she was alone and raised the hem and looked underneath. Only later had she learned the skirts were kilts, and that discovery had led to learning that her mother was Scottish.

  Douglas was more physically gifted than any of the young Greek statues in the garden. His thighs were more muscular, his calves better developed. His manhood, that curious appendage never covered by a fig leaf in the Greek Garden, was much longer and thicker.

  They were boys, and he was a man.

  His thick black hair was cut a little shorter than was fashionable. Clean-shaven, he had a carved, high-cheekboned face and blue-green eyes that showed what the Mediterranean must look like on a summer day. Each time he came into a room, the air seemed to hum, as if he were an important personage, a member of the royal family, a man of deep and consuming public interest.

  She circled the statues like greeting old friends, making mental notes of their condition, and where some needed to be repaired. Perhaps it was time to move some of the older statues inside, at least during the more punishing winter months.

  In the middle of the garden was a luckinbooth, a Scottish symbol of two hearts entwined and topped with a heart. The luckinbooth had been started when her mother had first come to Chavensworth. The gardeners had followed her plan, and now the intricate design was fully formed in mature boxwoods.

  Sarah’s hands fell to her sides, and she continued walking, past the lane that led to the sloping hill with its lon
e tree, the site of so many picnics. How many times had they gone there together, just she and her mother? The last time had been only two years ago, and already signs of weakness had slowed Morna’s walk. She’d been winded by the time they reached the oak, and even though she had waved aside Sarah’s concern, there had been shadows beneath her eyes and a slight bluish tint to her lips.

  Sarah wished the heavens would open up and the air turn white with rain. No one would be able to tell her tears from the downpour then. Now, however, they chilled her face as they were blown away by the wind.

  She found herself walking toward the stables, taking the gravel path to the right and, at the fork in the lane, abruptly changing directions and veering to the left. There was one place at Chavensworth where no one would disturb her. Only one place she could go and sob in solitude. Where neither footman nor maid or housekeeper or steward would dare open the door and intrude upon her privacy. From her childhood on, she’d always sought refuge in her grandfather’s observatory. The same man who made life miserable for her now with his heritage of the Henley Gift had created a magical place from which to view the stars.

  When her father had moved away from Chavensworth, taking up residence in London, she’d gone to the observatory. When her mother had first become ill, Sarah went there. When she fancied herself in love during her first season, only for the young man to offer for another’s hand, she’d returned home from London and immediately gone to the observatory where she sat listening to the sough of the wind around the oddly shaped building.

  How very foolish she had been, and how very foolish she felt right now. She was no longer a woman past the first blush of youth, but a child at this moment. She wanted comfort from the very woman who could not give it to her. She wanted her mother to tell her that things would be all right, but she was very much afraid they weren’t going to be, ever again. Sarah wanted her to sit up in her bed and announce she was famished, that it was time she was up and about. Sarah knew, however, that as much as she wished for something, as much as she wanted it, wishes and wants did not make them happen.

  A wagon sat in the middle of the path. As she watched, Douglas left the observatory, went to the side of the wagon, and grabbed another crate. As he lifted it, he looked up and saw her.

  At least he was fully dressed.

  But, really, should she be able to remember the sight of him naked so clearly?

  Chapter 12

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Thunder rolled from cloud to cloud, deadening her words, tossing them into the wind as quickly as they were voiced.

  He shook his head to indicate he didn’t understand, and she shouted the question again. Once more, he shook his head, then glanced upward at the lowering storm before setting down the crate, circling the wagon, and grabbing her arm to pull her inside the observatory.

  He had made changes here, changes that she hadn’t authorized or approved. Changes that had forever altered the atmosphere of the observatory, her childhood sanctuary.

  For long minutes, she remained silent, studying what he’d done. He’d wiped the dust from the shelves, loading them with his own possessions. Cylindrical glass vials sat next to an assortment of green-tinted bottles with cork stoppers. Wooden frames were propped on four of the shelves, each frame strung with a dozen or more filaments.

  On one side of the room, Douglas had mounted a large sheet of paper with an arrangement of numbers and letters written on it. Not a foreign language but something she couldn’t decipher. Two or three chests sat below each shelf. The worktable, made of wood and having lasted two generations, was now piled high with a series of trunks and crates.

  “How did you get the roof open?” she asked, glancing over at him. “It hasn’t worked in years.”

  His gaze traveled from the rounded top of the observatory to her face. “It just required a little oil,” he said.

  The observatory had ceased to be her sanctuary. Douglas had put his mark on it as adeptly as if he’d written his name everywhere.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked one more time.

  “Satisfying my bargain with your father.”

  She frowned, then remembered his words the night before about her waiting in judgment of others and smoothed the expression from her face.

  “How?”

  “By making diamonds,” he said, smiling.

  She stared at him, every thought flying out of her mind. “Only God can make diamonds.”

  “God has seen fit to share that knowledge with me,” he said, his smile not altered one whit.

  “How?”

  “It’s a process I’ve developed.”

  She sat down on a crate and stared up at him. “That’s what my father was willing to invest in? A way to make diamonds?”

  He nodded.

  “And you’ve made diamonds before?”

  He reached into his vest and withdrew a small black bag, then walked to where she sat.

  “Put your hand out,” he said, and she found herself doing exactly as he asked.

  Slowly, he covered the bowl of her palm with diamonds.

  The observatory was barely lit by the open door, but the diamonds still sparkled as if they were a source of light themselves. She stared at her hand in amazement.

  Finally, she tore her gaze away from the diamonds to rest on his face. He was still smiling.

  She didn’t know what to say to him, so she only stretched out her hand, watching as he poured the diamonds back into the velvet bag.

  “This place has a special significance to you, doesn’t it?”

  “How do you know that?” She didn’t look at him when she asked. Instead, she examined the label on one interesting-looking crate. She didn’t know the language printed on the side.

  “Because you’re angry.”

  She glanced at him. “I’m not, actually. I’m sad,” she said, a bit of honesty she hadn’t meant to give him. What was there about this man that compelled her to tell him the truth?

  For long moments, they didn’t speak, merely looked at each other. She was the first to glance away, uncomfortable with the intensity of his gaze or perhaps the compassion in it. She knew, without being told or without understanding truly how she knew it, that if she held out her hand, he would take it and hold it in his large warm grip. If she walked into his arms, he would embrace her, and perhaps bend his head down and lay his cheek against her windblown hair. If she wept, he would probably withdraw his handkerchief and blot her tears.

  She stood and looked around the observatory one last time. She knew she would not come back here again.

  “I think the observatory would serve your purposes well,” she said. After all, she had all of Chavensworth. Granted, the estate felt overrun with people occasionally, but if she needed a place uniquely hers, then it was no doubt an emotion that Douglas experienced as well. She pasted a smile on her face. Let her be a gracious hostess of Chavensworth.

  “You must let me know what else I can provide to make it a more hospitable place.”

  “Your presence, perhaps,” he said, surprising her again.

  She felt her brow furrow and deliberately smoothed it.

  “I know nothing of making diamonds,” she said.

  “But you know a great deal about making conversation, and I find that I enjoy our conversations very much.”

  “You do?”

  She couldn’t prevent her lips from curving into a smile. And she had no idea how to forestall a sudden spurt of warmth at his words. How very kind he could be.

  “I’ll leave you to your work,” she said.

  “Must you? I would much rather unpack crates while you talk to me.”

  “Are you very certain you don’t simply want another helper?” she asked, smiling at him. “There might be some chicanery behind your nice words.”

  “Chicanery? Me?” he said. “No chicanery, I assure you. Only self-interest. It’s a boring job. I’d much rather have the company of a beautiful woman.”

/>   She laughed. “Now you go too far,” she said. “I almost colluded with you until that remark.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t think you’re soliciting compliments, Sarah, but I find it almost impossible to believe that you don’t know how lovely you are. Are you that modest?”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “I know all my assets as well as my liabilities, Douglas. My father insisted upon it. There is nothing you can tell me about myself that has not been pointed out to me on countless occasions.”

  She turned to leave, and he reached out one hand and grabbed her arm.

  “Do you take everything your father says as the truth, Sarah?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you hold him up as an oracle of wisdom? Do you value what he says about Chavensworth? For that matter, do you value what he says or does about your mother?”

  “You, of all people, should know that I don’t.”

  “Then why give what he says about you any credence?”

  “It was not simply my father, Douglas. I have had two seasons. Two. Two very expensive seasons. I attended hundreds of events; I was fêted as only the daughter of a duke can be. I was introduced to every eligible male in all of the Commonwealth, I believe. I was presented to the Queen.”

  “And?”

  He could not be that obtuse.

  “I did not attract the attention of one man. Not one.”

  She was not going to tell him about the tendre she had for the young earl who’d danced so magnificently, and acted so attentive, only to ignore her the next time she saw him, as if she’d been rendered invisible. She’d learned, later, that he’d become engaged, to an heiress, of course, leaving Sarah feeling as if her heart had been badly bruised.

  She did not wish to be more of an object of pity than she was.

  “Then they were all blind,” he said flatly.

  “There is no need for kindness, I can assure you.”