by Karen Ranney
Elsbeth slid into her usual place, a chair near the end of the table. When the footman came to stand at her left, she nodded and he ladled soup into the bowl on her plate.
Connor had stopped eating his soup before half of it was done. Didn’t he like the chowder Addy had made?
The footman gathered up his bowl, and Connor thanked him, something he wasn’t supposed to do. How many lectures had she endured from Rhona? The servants were never to be thanked. One didn’t notice the servants.
Nor did he seem very impressed with the sweetbreads and she couldn’t blame him. But he had smiled when haggis was served, adding a comment that his father had told him about it. At least he’d eaten some of that.
That was the last thing he’d said. He’d been content to remain silent for most of the meal, only answering questions in monosyllables. She just wished Felix, who had a penchant for talking about himself, would emulate Connor’s behavior.
What a pity Felix had no friends at Bealadair. The only person he was remotely polite to was his wife. Lara looked at Felix as if he were the most wonderful man on earth, not noticing that few people could tolerate her husband.
Did the duchess know that Elsbeth had given Connor an abbreviated tour of the house? A quick shake of Muira’s head indicated that the subject hadn’t been addressed.
As if the duchess had heard her thoughts, Rhona smiled brightly at Connor and said, “What did you think of Bealadair?”
“I’ve seen the elephant.”
The duchess looked slightly taken aback. Elsbeth wondered if it was because of Connor’s comment or the fact that he hadn’t appended a Your Grace to his answer. Rhona was a stickler for formality.
She wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Connor called the duchess Aunt. She could just imagine what would happen, then. Rhona would draw herself up, her face stiff, and address Connor with ice in her voice.
No one had a frozen tone like the Duchess of Lothian.
“What a pity the weather is so bad,” Rhona said, her equanimity evidently restored again. “We could have shown you just a portion of the acreage that belongs to Bealadair.”
“Two hundred eighty thousand acres, to be precise,” Felix said, sounding as officious as if he, himself, had made a gift of the land to Connor.
“Our family is one of the largest landholders in Scotland,” Lara said, her tone mimicking her husband’s. As if it was their bequest to Connor.
“It’s not a bad size,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Felix said.
“It’s not a bad size,” Connor repeated. “It’s not as big as the XIV Ranch, but it’s a good size.”
“I suppose this ranch of yours is so much bigger,” Felix said, derision coating every syllable.
Connor didn’t comment, merely put down his wineglass, sat back in his chair, and regarded Felix almost as if he were a child misbehaving at the dinner table.
“The XIV Ranch is one of the largest in Texas,” Mr. Kirby said before Connor could speak. “If not the world. It’s over two million acres.”
No one said anything for such a long time that Elsbeth knew she would forever recall this occasion when the McCraights were struck dumb with disbelief.
The duchess turned to Mr. Kirby, her face blank of any expression.
“Certainly you’re mistaken,” she said. “Two million acres? How is that possible?”
“A little over two million acres,” Connor said. “More than two hundred miles. It takes a number of days to ride from one side of the ranch to the other.”
Elsbeth sat back in her chair. Of course nothing at Bealadair had impressed him. She couldn’t even conceive of two million acres.
What could Scotland possibly offer him? His ancestry, the history of his forbearers, except that hadn’t seemed to impress him, either. What would cause him to be glad he’d come to Scotland? Would anything?
“I’ve heard that you Texans are given to exaggeration,” Felix said.
Felix had just made a grave error. Surely everyone at the dinner table could figure that out just by looking at Connor’s face. His expression had smoothed, but there was fire in his eyes.
Didn’t Felix have any concept of self-defense? Didn’t he realize that Connor’s expression was, if not murderous, then certainly threatening?
“I’m certain Felix did not mean to make that sound like an insult,” Elsbeth said.
Not one person took up the refrain.
She looked across the table and met Mr. Kirby’s eyes. He seemed strangely amused. Perhaps he had never seen anyone challenge Connor quite like Felix was doing at the moment.
She didn’t know anything about Texas. Was it an unruly place where a man needed to protect himself?
Dear heavens, did he have a gun?
To her horror, Felix evidently had the same thought.
“I suppose you can hit a bull’s-eye while balancing your rifle over your shoulder and not even looking at it. Is that correct?”
One of Connor’s eyebrows inched upward, but he still didn’t say anything.
Mr. Kirby, however, spoke into the silence. “Connor is an excellent shot, Mr. Gillespie.”
Only that. No challenge, no taunting of the other man. Felix must’ve heard something in Mr. Kirby’s words that no one else did.
Felix glanced from the older man back to Connor.
“Would you care to have a match, Your Grace?”
The worst thing about that question was not that he was actually challenging Connor to a shooting contest. No, Felix had to inject derision into the way he said Your Grace. As if he knew how much Connor disliked being addressed in that fashion. It was almost as if he were saying, You don’t deserve the title, you ignorant American.
She sent a quick look to Mr. Kirby, but he wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on Felix.
“I didn’t bring my guns with me,” Connor said.
Guns?
“I’d be happy to lend you one of my rifles,” Felix was saying.
Elsbeth glanced toward Lara, but she wasn’t looking at her husband. Instead, she was smiling down at her plate.
Did she think that Felix shaming the new duke would end well? There was no question that Felix was the better shot. The man practiced hours every day. Crates of ammunition arrived at Bealadair every week. When he wasn’t telling someone what a good shot he was, he was out proving it. She couldn’t walk along the edge of the forest without seeing a tree riddled with Felix’s bullets.
“There’s no need for His Grace to prove his marksmanship, Felix,” she said.
Connor turned his head slowly until his attention was directed solely on her. For a moment, she thought there was something in his eyes that surely wasn’t there: a warmth, an understanding of her fear. In an instant it was gone, leaving her to wonder if it had only been her imagination.
“It’s all right, Elsbeth,” he said. “If Mr. Gillespie feels the need to display his ability, I’ve no objection to giving him a chance. If he wants to make a fool of himself, that’s on him.”
She bit back her moan with some difficulty, certain that she was witnessing the beginning of a terrible tragedy. And that was before anyone knew Connor was selling Bealadair.
Rather than follow the family into the parlor, Elsbeth murmured some excuse about having to talk to Addy and escaped from the dining room.
Instead of heading toward the kitchen, however, she made her way to the fourth floor, knocking on Mrs. Ferguson’s door as she did every evening. When she heard the housekeeper’s voice, she pushed open the door, the odor of camphor reaching out to surround her.
She wasn’t surprised to see Molly there, the upstairs maid tucking in a few heated bricks around Mrs. Ferguson’s hips as she sat in her rocking chair.
The older woman had always been like a surrogate mother to the girls under her charge. Molly, like several of the maids, had chosen to go into service rather than take a factory job. Since the staff numbered over a hundred people and the house was
so large, Bealadair was like its own village.
All in all, she thought the staff was happy here. What would happen to them when Bealadair was sold?
Elsbeth greeted Molly before crossing the room to close the curtains. She held out her hand, testing the seal around the window, pleased when she didn’t feel any drafts. The room was, she was grateful to see, warm and comfortable despite the frigid night. The air was clear and crisp, stars blinking at her from a midnight sky.
She closed the curtains and took a chair beside the fire, all three of them chatting before Molly left.
Once they were alone, Mrs. Ferguson extended her hands toward the fire. The winter months had been difficult for her, and it seemed as if Elsbeth could see the nodules grow larger on the other woman’s fingers every day.
Mrs. Ferguson’s face was moon shaped, her cheeks plump and her lips full. Her body, however, didn’t seem to match. She was tall and thin, with bony shoulders and sharp elbows. Her brown eyes were expressive and could go from approval to censure in an instant, as easily as they could from irritation to amusement.
She was a favorite of the staff and when they could, almost every one of them took time during the week to come and visit her. Even the majordomo, Mr. Barton, unbent enough to call from time to time.
Elsbeth hadn’t expected the duke to visit, however. When the housekeeper announced that he had come to her suite, she simply stared at the older woman.
“He came to see me, he said, to make sure there was nothing I needed.” Mrs. Ferguson smiled. “A very handsome man, is he not?”
Elsbeth nodded.
“He is very . . .” Mrs. Ferguson’s voice trailed off, then resumed a few seconds later. “Not overpowering, exactly, but there’s something about him. You would never miss that he came into a room.”
“No,” Elsbeth said. “You would not.”
“How do you find him?”
She’d never lied to Mrs. Ferguson. Next to Gavin, she was probably more honest with the housekeeper than with anyone else at Bealadair. As much as she liked Muira, Elsbeth was hesitant to be too frank with her. Muira often used information as a weapon or a way to protect herself from her sisters’ caustic words.
“Intriguing,” she said.
Mrs. Ferguson sighed. “I found him the same. He certainly reminds a woman that she’s female.”
The comment so surprised Elsbeth that she studied the housekeeper. The woman’s cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkling. She hadn’t looked so well in weeks.
The duke had evidently made a friend.
“Did he say anything else?” Elsbeth asked. Had Connor told Mrs. Ferguson of his plans to sell Bealadair?
“He asked about my health and told me that they used something in Texas on their horses that might prove to be beneficial to my arthritis.”
The housekeeper’s brown eyes were alight with amusement.
“Can you imagine? But he’s going to try to find the ingredients to—as he said—stir up a batch to see if it would work.”
“That’s very kind of him.”
And exceedingly strange. However, Elsbeth had the feeling that she would be thinking that often, or as long as the duke remained in Scotland.
They sat in silence for a moment, Elsbeth remembering the look on Connor’s face as he gazed at the portraits.
“The duke didn’t know that Gavin and Graham were twins,” she said. “Evidently, his father never told him.”
Mrs. Ferguson stuck her gloved hands beneath the blanket on her lap. Her hands pained her the worst in the winter months.
“Has he any siblings?”
Elsbeth nodded. “Five sisters,” she said, wishing she could remember their names.
“The McCraights always have produced more girls than boys. Has he any children of his own?”
“He isn’t married,” Elsbeth said. “Nor did he mention planning on marrying.”
She told the housekeeper about the Texas saddle, Connor’s comments about his cattle, and his insistence that she call him by his first name.
“What does Her Grace say?” Mrs. Ferguson asked, her eyes twinkling.
They both knew that the duchess was a stickler for propriety, forever lecturing Elsbeth on one thing or another. It was as if the woman, having agreed to take Elsbeth in when she was eight, thought she was a foundling, someone who’d never been reared with any kind of rules or proper manners.
Over the years Elsbeth had developed a way of half listening to Rhona at the same time she appeared to be intent on the duchess’s criticism. It was the only way she could tolerate the other woman’s constant efforts to change her. Nothing she ever did was proper enough. That was made abundantly clear only a few years after moving to Bealadair.
Thank heavens for Gavin. If she never felt a mother’s love from the duchess, at least she had a father figure.
From what Connor said, he had the same respect for his father.
Would she feel betrayed if she discovered Gavin had hid information from her? Perhaps she would have. Or would she have just been curious as to the reason why?
“She doesn’t know, even though she did look a little surprised when His Grace referred to me by my first name.” She’d been waiting for the duchess to ask her about that, which was just one of the reasons she had escaped to Mrs. Ferguson’s room.
She proceeded to tell the other woman what she’d learned at dinner. The housekeeper looked as stunned as she’d felt about the size of the XIV Ranch. When she came to Felix’s challenge, Mrs. Ferguson shook her head.
“He thinks he’s big, but a wee coat fits him,” the housekeeper said.
Elsbeth nodded.
“Surely they won’t go through with it?”
“I can almost guarantee you that the contest will take place,” Elsbeth said.
There’d been a look in Connor’s eyes, one that warned her he didn’t take well to being challenged by Felix. Not because he was the Duke of Lothian, but because he was Connor McCraight. Or maybe even because he was an American. Or a Texan.
“Felix is quite a good shot,” the housekeeper said.
“He has little to do but improve his marksmanship.”
“Perhaps it would be foolish to wish that he’d let His Grace win.”
Felix had nothing else to brag about; his prowess with weapons was evidently important to him.
Was it as important to Connor?
“He’s selling the house,” she said. “The new duke. He’s selling Bealadair.”
She truly wished she hadn’t been the source of that quick look of fear on the older woman’s face. But if she didn’t tell the housekeeper she would be doing the woman a disservice.
Bad news delayed didn’t mean bad news erased.
“Oh, dear, is he really?”
She nodded.
“Are you certain?”
Elsbeth nodded again. “Yes. It’s definite.”
Mrs. Ferguson, probably more than anyone, needed to make arrangements for her future. Gavin had made very generous bequests to the servants and hadn’t forgotten the housekeeper. Thanks to him, Mrs. Ferguson had enough funds to care for herself for the rest of her life. She had a widowed sister who lived near Glasgow. She’d often spoken of how they had planned to live together in their older years.
The housekeeper nodded several times as Elsbeth told her about the tour of the house and the duke’s revelations.
“Well, it’s what we feared, isn’t it? At least we no longer need to worry.”
That was true enough.
“The rest of the family won’t feel that sanguine about it,” Elsbeth said.
“No, they won’t, will they?”
They exchanged a glance. The next few weeks were bound to be tumultuous ones.
She really should tamp out that fluttering feeling at the thought of seeing Connor tomorrow. He would be returning to America soon, but not before disrupting all their lives, hers included.
A good reason not to be fascinated with the man.
Chapter 14
Elsbeth knew the exact minute Mr. Glassey had a conversation with the duchess the next morning. She knew, because she could hear Rhona shouting her name.
Despite Rhona’s penchant for propriety, she was not above raising her voice to make a point.
Before she could reach the duchess’s sitting room, Elsbeth heard her name again. More than one maid sent her a commiserating glance as she moved from the kitchen, through the hall, and up the grand staircase.
She would not take the servants’ stairs. Refusing to do so now was a small, secret act of rebellion.
The duchess was not in her sitting room as she expected.
The third time she heard her name being called, Elsbeth sighed, turned, and walked to the end of the corridor.
One of the previous dukes had a bit of whimsy about him. He’d taken perfectly ordinary rooms and made them odd. The Ship Room was one of those. The first time she’d entered, she immediately had the impression of angles and walls jutting toward her. Only after a moment had she realized that by taking a series of small steps to the right, then turning to the left, she would enter what looked like the bow of a ship. From there, she could look down on the rest of the room. The windows mounted high in the wall became the horizon. Perhaps you could imagine yourself the captain of this imaginary ship.
When she’d asked Gavin if he and Graham had played there, his smile had been so sad that she wished she hadn’t been curious.
“Yes,” he’d said. “We loved that room. We were pirates or buccaneers. Graham was always besting me with a sword.”
“A sword?”
“We borrowed them from the old wing,” he said, his chuckle banishing the sadness for a bit. “Our mother was furious with us, of course, but we didn’t stop. We loved that place. And the Bubble Room.”
She opened the door to the Bubble Room, so called because of the odd window glass that took up most of the far wall. The glass bulged outward, making it feel as if you were in the middle of a bubble. The view of the eastern section of Bealadair was slightly blurred around the edges, but in the center it was spectacular, especially on this bright morning with the sun glinting on the snow.
