Temptation

by Jude Deveraux

  “Roof,” the women said together, then laughed.

  “How do you know so much about the family? Or does everyone know?”

  “My husband was the estate agent for James.”

  Temperance grimaced. “And the laird certainly took care of you after your husband’s death, didn’t he?”

  “I think you should be less harsh with James. Truthfully, the first time I . . .” Trailing off, she looked down the hall, not meeting Temperance’s eyes.

  From experience, Temperance guessed that Grace carried the great secret that she had made the first moves toward McCairn. “Loneliness makes us all do things we sometimes regret,” she said in dismissal. “Shall we look inside that room?” Temperance asked, nodding toward a door at the end of the hall. “Tell me more.”

  “The gambling seems to skip generations and people. James’s grandfather had it, his father and Angus didn’t. James doesn’t, but his brother, Colin, does. It’s a good thing for all the people who want to live here that James was born the oldest.”

  “I can’t get this door open,” Temperance said as she pushed against it.

  As Grace put her shoulder to the door to help, she kept talking. “Even though James’s father didn’t gamble, he considered himself a gentleman, so he spent what was left of the McCairn fortune that the old man hadn’t gambled away. The younger brother, James’s uncle Angus, was better off, as he didn’t inherit the burden of this place, so he was free to run off to Edinburgh and make his fortune in the drapery trade.”

  “And Angus was never a gentleman,” Temperance said under her breath as she pushed on the door. “Wait a minute,” she said, then disappeared into a bedroom and returned with a fire poker, which she used on the rusted hinges of the door.

  As Temperance worked, Grace leaned against the wall and talked. “By the time James and Colin came along, there wasn’t much money left. My husband said the accounts were very low and the whole estate was in dreadful shape.”

  “Who does the accounting now?”

  “I have no idea,” Grace said. “James was never one to sit at a desk for long. He’s more of a physical person. You should see him on a horse! He’s almost as good as young Ramsey who rides in the races. Anyway, when he was a child, James used to visit McCairn, and he loved it, and since his father died, it’s been his life goal to take this place back to what it once was. He wants McCairn wool to become known for its quality. His uncle Angus introduces him to buyers.”

  As Temperance pushed on the hinge, the poker slid off and scraped her finger. Putting the injured digit into her mouth, she leaned against the door and looked at Grace. “What about McCairn’s wife?”

  “Oh, her. Poor thing, she cried for the whole two years they were married. She hated anything with the McCairn name attached to it: him and the land.”

  “That’s easy to understand,” Temperance said as she turned back to the door.

  “She saw the state of this house and didn’t have the gumption to clean it up or to do much of anything except whine.”

  “Didn’t do her duty as the laird’s wife, right?” Temperance said as she gouged the hinge with the poker.

  “She didn’t do anything. Did you see that key?”

  “What key?” Temperance asked, then saw that Grace was pointing to the top of the door.

  Temperance grabbed a rickety chair from the hallway, pulled it to the front of the door, balanced on it, then grabbed the key. It fit the lock perfectly, and after a few tries in the rusty old lock, it turned.

  Inside was a ballroom. It was a huge, empty room, with a wooden floor made for dancing. At the end were tall windows with curved tops. The walls had been painted with scenes of sunlit gardens, complete with flowers and birds.

  “It’s beautiful,” Temperance breathed as she batted at a cobweb hanging from the ceiling. Overhead was a huge crystal chandelier that, when filled with lighted candles, would no doubt make the room look heavenly.

  As Temperance walked across the floor, she left footprints in the dust. The huge windows were so dirty that they let in little light.

  “Ah, yes, the ballroom,” Grace said, looking about her. “I’d forgotten this place existed.”

  “But you’ve seen it before?”

  “No, only heard of it. My husband used to tell me about the parties he went to in here when he was a child.”

  “Ah, yes, society,” Temperance said with a bit of contempt in her voice.

  “Oh, no. James’s grandmother used to give parties for all of McCairn. I know the place doesn’t look like much now, but fifty years ago McCairn was prosperous. There was a lot of money from the sheep and the fish and—” She broke off, embarrassed.

  “But everything was spent,” Temperance said as she touched what had once been a red velvet curtain. The fabric came away in her hands.

  “I guess,” Grace said, looking at one of the murals on the wall. “My husband told me that James’s grandfather went to his grave saying that his wife had spent more than he gambled. He used to say that she bought things and hid them.”

  “Like the dishes and the candlesticks.”

  “Yes, but on a larger scale. Gavie, that was my husband’s name, said an old stableman used to tell him that the two of them fought horribly. They’d scream that each was spending all the money. Whatever, when they died, there wasn’t much left.”

  Temperance was looking up at the chandelier and trying to count the number of candles it would hold. “I think the man won on that count, because if his wife had bought a lot, maybe some of it could have been sold later.”

  “That’s just it,” Grace said, and there was an urgency in her voice. “What happened to all that she bought?”

  Temperance looked at Grace. “What do you mean?”

  Walking toward her, Grace lowered her voice. “Gavie took care of all the accounts from the time he was a young man. He had a good head for numbers. If James’s grandmother bought as much as her husband accused her of, and if she spent the McCairn fortune as she is still accused of, what happened to all the things that she bought?”

  “Were they sold to pay gambling debts?”

  “No. The old man gambled what he had, but he didn’t die in debt. He died in relative poverty, but he owed no one. When my Gavie stepped in, there were years of receipts that had been thrown into drawers, and he began to sort through them. He used to come home at night and tell me about what he’d found. She bought silver and lots of it. There were punch bowls and vases. And she bought things like gold statues made by a man named Cel . . . I forgot the name. It was something foreign.”

  Temperance lifted one eyebrow. “Cellini?”

  “That’s it.”

  “My goodness,” Temperance said. “I could see that someone of taste had bought some of the furniture, but even I have heard of Cellini.” She was quiet for a moment. “Did your husband think that maybe the two of them were in a war? Maybe she was buying things to keep him from gambling it all away. Investment things?”

  “That’s what Gavie thought,” Grace said quietly. “He used to say . . .”

  “What?” Temperance said sharply.

  “—that all the things that James’s grandmother bought were still somewhere in this house. She had to hide them from her husband to keep him from selling them and gambling the money away.”

  “If that were true and neither of her sons were gamblers, wouldn’t she have told them what she’d done and where she’d hidden the loot?”

  Grace hesitated before speaking, as though she were trying to decide if she should speak. “Maybe she meant to tell, but he killed her before she could tell anyone anything.”

  “What?” Temperance asked, eyes wide.

  Grace lowered her voice even more, then looked around as though to make sure that no one was listening. “Only my Gavie knew the truth, and he only told me on his deathbed. The old man had a terrible fight with his wife, worse than usual. He said he was going to kill her if she didn’t tell him what she’d done
with all the things she’d bought.”

  Grace took a breath and calmed herself. “No one knows this,” she said.

  “I won’t tell, if that’s what you mean,” Temperance reassured her.

  “The old man was a dreadful person, and he used to frighten my husband a lot. He said Gavie was a little snoop and if he ever again caught him where he shouldn’t be, he was going to horsewhip him. So on that day when Gavie was only seven years old and had sneaked into the master’s bedroom to snitch a chocolate, he hid in the wardrobe when he heard voices.”

  “And he saw the murder?” Temperance asked.

  “Not murder, an accidental killing. They wrestled over a pistol, and it went off, killing her instantly. But the horrible part was that the old man told people that she’d committed suicide.”

  “Not exactly honorable of him, was it?”

  “Worse than you know. He allowed his wife to be buried in unconsecrated ground, and later he tore her down to her own sons, and they in turn, told their sons until . . .”

  “Until today James sneers at the mention of her name and hates her beautiful house so much that he lets it go to ruin.”

  “Exactly.”

  For a while Temperance was silent as she looked about the dirty room and saw the beauty hidden under the filth. To Temperance it seemed that all her life she’d heard one horror story after another of women who had been unfairly accused, innocently blamed, and, in general, persecuted by men. From the splendor of the ballroom, Temperance could see that the woman had loved beauty. But what had happened to this woman who had given parties for the villagers? She had been killed by her own husband, then had had her reputation taken from her.

  After a while, Temperance said, “Shall we go?” Then, as they were leaving the room, Temperance said, “Tell me about this man Hamish. Surely James couldn’t like him, so why does he allow him to stay?”

  “Hamish was a McCairn on his mother’s side, which means that James can’t get rid of the man, that he has a right to a home here. Any McCairn can return to this land and he’ll always be given a home.”

  “That could produce a lot of people who don’t want to work for a living,” Temperance said as they started down the hall.

  “Not around James,” Grace said. “No one lives near James and doesn’t work.”

  “But I wonder if they work as hard as he does,” Temperance said softly as she opened the door into the bedroom that she’d taken as her own.

  And standing in front of the mirror was Grace’s young daughter, Alys, a sea of Temperance’s hats at her feet. And on her head was a hat that was nearly as wide as the girl was tall.

  To Temperance it was an amusing picture, but Grace was very upset as she grabbed her daughter’s upper arm.

  “How dare you do this!” Grace said. “I’ll—”

  “There’s no harm done,” Temperance said. “Here, why don’t you keep that hat if you like it so much?”

  Grace took the hat before her daughter touched it again. “You have done enough for us. We’ll not accept charity.”

  For a moment Temperance was taken aback at Grace’s change from friend and confidant to this prideful woman standing before her. But Temperance knew about pride.

  “All right,” Temperance said good-naturedly, looking at the girl, “how would you like to have this one?” Reaching into a wardrobe, she withdrew the hat she’d worn on the night she’d walked to McCairn’s house. It had no shape now and was still covered with mud. Most of the flowers that had been on it were gone, but what remained were torn and dirty. “Would this make a nice play hat?”

  “Oh, yes,” the girl breathed as she reached for the forlorn-looking hat, but she looked askance at her mother first.

  “All right,” Grace said, then gave a small smile to Temperance. “We owe you too much,” she whispered.

  “True,” Temperance said. “So maybe you could repay me by making me a nice lunch that I could take up the mountain.”

  Grace didn’t move but stood there looking at Temperance. “You’re going to the McCairn again today?”

  At that Temperance laughed. “If you think there’s going to be a romance, you can forget the idea. I need to find out what he wants in a wife. Although . . . he is a fine-looking man . . .”

  Temperance had hoped to make Grace smile, but she didn’t. Instead she was looking at Temperance as though trying to figure out something. And she looked at her so long that Temperance began to wonder if Grace was jealous. Did she have some feelings for James McCairn that she was hiding?

  After a while, Grace said, “There’s no lamb, but I do have a bit of salmon left. Will that do?”

  Temperance laughed. There were three lambs in the kitchen now, all of them sent down the mountain by James to be slaughtered, but Temperance had adopted each of them. Young Ramsey had a full-time job looking after them.

  “Salmon is fine,” she said, and the women exchanged smiles.

  Eleven

  “And who does your accounts now?” Temperance asked James. They were sitting in the sunshine outside the little cave.

  “What kind of woman are you that you can’t enjoy the day?” James snapped.

  “And what has put you into such a bad mood?” she snapped back. “Missing your regular visits to Grace?”

  “Who said they were regular? And you and your inquisition would put any man off his food.”

  “You don’t seem to be off yours. You’ve eaten yours and mine.”

  “That’s because you have your mind on something besides food. You want to tell me what it is?”

  “I was wondering . . .” Temperance pulled her knees to her chest. What could she say? That she was wondering about his ancestors? About his village? About his brother the gambler?

  When she said nothing, he said, “I do the accounts, and I hate every minute of it. You want to take them over?”

  “Me? A mere woman? Don’t you think your Hamish would say that a woman doing accounts was going against God?”

  When he was silent, she turned around to look at him and he was staring at her.

  “What’s got into you today, woman?” he asked quietly.

  She wasn’t going to tell him the truth, that all the way up the mountain she’d thought about the dreadful life of his grandmother, with her gambler husband, and how she was now buried in unconsecrated ground. A restless soul, no doubt. Temperance wouldn’t have been surprised if she had been told that the woman haunted the house where she’d been so very unhappy.

  “Are there any ghosts in your house?”

  “I’m sure there are, and maybe they’d be more pleasant company than what’s here now.”

  Temperance laughed, stretched out her legs, and leaned back on her hands, putting her face up to the sun. “I think I would like to look at your accounts, actually. You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I’d kiss your feet if you did that for me.” His voice lowered. “Or any other part of you that you would care to make bare.”

  Temperance knew how she was presenting her body to him now, and she knew that she should sit in a more ladylike position, but she didn’t move. For all that they were alone, she felt safe near him, and she knew that he wasn’t going to make a move without her permission.

  On the other hand, she was already beginning to think of giving him permission. She was nearly thirty years old and she was a virgin. This was by choice, since she’d certainly had many offers to give up her virginity, but until now she’d never met a man who had made her consider doing so.

  Today, in these first years of the new twentieth century, women were talking about “free love.” After all, there was birth control now, and—

  “There you are,” said a voice that startled both of them, and a woman’s head popped up over the side of the mountain not a foot from Temperance’s shoe. The head was soon followed by a neck; then the woman put her palms on the ground and, with a great heave, she projected her whole body upward until she was standing on the very edge of the mount
ain and looking down at Temperance and James.

  “They told me that if I’d follow the path, I’d find you here, but why bother with a path when there’s a mountain to climb, is what I always say.” She stopped talking for a moment as she looked down at Temperance as though she were something she was thinking about purchasing.

  Temperance, with her hand shielding her eyes, looked up at her. The woman wasn’t very tall, but she was certainly muscular looking. She stood with her back rigid, her bosom thrust out, her hands on her hips; her face was brown from the sun, making it impossible to tell her age, but had Temperance tried to guess she’d have said the woman had to be at least forty-five years old. Did James know her?

  “Soft, aren’t you?” she said to Temperance.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Turning, the woman looked at James, apparently dismissing Temperance as of no consequence. “I hear you need a wife,” she said.

  At that Temperance made a bit of a gasp that she tried to cover with a little cough.

  “Tubercular,” the woman said with a look of contempt down at Temperance. “No oxygen to your lungs.”

  “I think I get enough ox—”

  The woman turned away. “I’m Penelope Beecher, and I am fit for the job of wife. I am a follower of Sandow and Macfadden, and I can lift a full-grown ram. I have climbed four of the ten highest mountains in the world, and I plan to climb the other six before I die.”

  “Which will be soon if you don’t get off my mountain,” James said quietly.

  The woman didn’t seem to hear him. “I have a thirteen-inch neck, my upper arm, flexed, is twelve and three quarters; my expanded chest is thirty-eight; deflated it’s thirty-four. My waist is twenty-five, and that’s without a corset.” At that she looked down at Temperance with a bit of a sneer. “My—”

  James recovered himself enough to stand up and look down at the woman. “I couldn’t care less what the bloody hell your—”