Artie didn’t seem to have any qualms about touching it. Picking it up, he held it to the light. “Name of Edweena?”
“Yes,” Kenna said. “How did you know?”
“The name’s engraved on the edge.”
“The woman’s name is engraved on it?” Kenna asked in astonishment. “But that doesn’t make sense. She found it, and her husband—” Kenna put her fingertips to her temples. “No, wait. What did Gavie say when he gave it to me? He said that he saw the thing on her desk. He was snooping in her bedroom, not the old man’s. Gavie picked the thing up, but when he heard someone coming, he hid in the closet. He didn’t realize that he still had the ornament in his hand. He said . . .”
She paused for a moment. “Yes, Gavie said that she was looking for it, frantically searching through drawers, and he felt bad that he had it because he’d always liked the woman. Gavie said he was planning to drop the thing on the floor after she left so she’d think it’d been there all along.”
“But she was killed?”
“Yes. Her husband came into the room, and she accused him of stealing it. Gavie said there was a horrible fight and they got very angry, both of them shouting and screaming and accusing each other of dreadful things. Gavie was just a kid at the time, so he never thought to step out of the closet and give the thing back. But then the next thing that happened was that the old man shot her. Gavie said it was an accident. It was her gun. She screamed that she was sick of him and his snooping into everything she owned, so she drew out her gun, a tiny derringer. But when the old man tried to take the little gun from her, it went off.”
Pausing, Kenna looked at Artie. “After that everyone in the house came running, and in the chaos Gavie sneaked out of the closet. He didn’t even realize that he still had the brass ornament in his hand until he was outside, and by then he was too afraid to tell anyone what he’d seen. In fact, he never told anyone about what he’d seen until years later when we were in bed together.”
“Was she a gambler too?”
“No, only the old man gambled, and I heard that later, his grandson Colin did. Gambling is like a disease in that family and it skips a generation.”
“So what do you think she was doing with this template? Was she altering it so he’d lose at the gaming tables? Maybe she was hoping he’d be shot when it was found out that he was cheating,” Artie said, still looking at the template in interest.
“Maybe, but why is her name on the thing? It’s as though that was her template, not his.”
“Maybe she was planning to do some gambling herself, beat him at his own game. But whatever it was, this thing must have been important to her because she pulled a gun on the old man when she thought he’d stolen it. Didn’t she gamble at all?”
“In a way, she did. She outspent him. What he didn’t gamble away, she spent. Gavie used to say that—” Suddenly, Kenna sat up straight, her eyes wide.
“What is it?” Artie asked enthusiastically.
“Treasure. She left it all behind. Cards. A pack of cards to James. Not to Colin. He showed me. Pictures of the treasure on the cards.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Artie said, obviously annoyed that he was being left out of whatever she was talking about.
Kenna suddenly grabbed the template, then leaped across the bed, and picked up the letter, all while pulling the bell to call her maid. “Get out.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Get out. Now. Go away. Never come back.”
“Whatever is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m going to get married, that’s all. I’m going to marry a man who doesn’t know it, but he’s fabulously wealthy.”
For a moment Artie looked annoyed that he was being dismissed, then he gave a slow, seductive smile. “May I come and visit you?”
At that Kenna looked him up and down. “If I remember James correctly,” she said softly, “he smells of sheep. Of course you may visit me. But not until after I’m married.”
“Of course not,” Artie said as he gathered his clothes across one arm, then walked past the shocked maid stark naked.
Eighteen
Temperance was in her bedroom, where she was often since she and James had had their quarrel. She busied herself with making notes on what she’d observed in McCairn and tried to make a plan of what she could use when she returned to New York.
When she heard a knock on her door, she looked up and said, “Come in.”
An older woman stood there, and it took Temperance a moment to place her. She was the mother of Finola.
Temperance gave the woman a smile, but she wanted to get back to her papers and besides, she knew exactly what the woman wanted. “Oh,” she said, “it was your daughter who made the sketches for the dresses. Yes, I’m going to get to them soon. I just haven’t had time.”
“No,” the woman said. “I didn’t come about that. We want to invite you to dinner.”
“Dinner?” Temperance said distractedly. “Yes, dinner. See Eppie in the kitchen; she’ll give you something to eat.”
When the woman didn’t move, Temperance could feel her staring. Annoyed, Temperance put down her pen. “I really will get to the sketches,” she said to the woman. “I won’t forget.”
The woman didn’t lose her smile. “I’m sure that you will, and I’m sure that you’ll do with my daughter what you did with Grace, but right now, how’d you like to have something to eat?”
For a few moments, Temperance just sat there blinking at the woman. In all her years of helping women, she couldn’t remember even one occasion when someone had invited her to dinner. When she went to visit a person in need, Temperance always showed up with a basket full of food— and she had come to realize that such an offering was expected of her.
“Don’t tell me you don’t eat dinner?” the woman asked, looking at Temperance in disbelief.
“No, I do; it’s just that . . .”
“If you’re waitin’ for James to show up, ye’ll have a long wait, as he’s up on the mountain, keepin’ his pride company.”
At that Temperance laughed. “You know, I am hungry. I’ll just stop in the kitchen and get—”
“No you won’t,” the woman said, her jaw rigid. “You come empty-handed or you don’t come at all.”
“Well, then,” Temperance said as she stood, “I guess I’ll go empty-handed.”
As Temperance walked behind the woman, out of the house, and down toward the village, they met half a dozen children on the way. In the weeks since they’d been skating, Temperance hadn’t seen much of the children. In fact, lately her time had been so taken up with hats and writing her observations that she hadn’t been outside often.
As they walked toward the village, the children chattering beside her, Temperance tried to suppress a smile. They were obviously planning a sort of celebration, and she was the guest of honor. She wondered what they had prepared: speeches and tributes of various sorts? Would she be embarrassed by their effusive thanks? Truthfully, she did hope that they didn’t go on too long, as she had work to do.
The woman stopped at one of the whitewashed cottages, opened the door, and went inside, then stood there for a moment while she waited for Temperance to enter. For a moment Temperance hesitated. They couldn’t get many people inside that small house, could they? Where was everyone going to sit?
But then Temperance decided that this particular party wasn’t up to her to organize and she wasn’t going to hurt this woman’s feelings by pointing out the obvious. They’d all soon see the need for more space.
Inside the house a peat fire burned in the hearth, and two children, a boy and a girl, were seated at the table, the younger child, the boy, diligently making marks on a slate tablet, while the girl was reading a book. How quaint, Temperance thought.
“Sit and make yourself at home,” the woman said.
The boy looked up at Temperance when she was sitting on a chair on the other side of the table. “Mam felt sorry for y
ou bein’ up at the big house all alone,” the boy said.
“Hush!” his mother said as she bent over a big iron pot hung in the fireplace.
Sorry for me? Temperance thought but only smiled. Where were the other people? “What are you reading?” she asked the girl.
“Homer’s Iliad,” the girl said.
“Oh,” Temperance said, surprised. “Isn’t that a bit difficult reading?”
“Oh, no,” the girl answered. “Master says that a person only learns when he strives for the best.”
“I see,” Temperance said, but she couldn’t imagine old Hamish as anything except a pest—but then, maybe there was another side to him. “And what else does Hamish say?” Temperance asked the girl; then her eyes opened wide as she heard the answer.
Melanie McCairn walked right past her daughter and didn’t recognize her.
“Mother!” came a familiar voice, but when Melanie turned, what she saw was a scene out of the children’s story of Heidi. Her sophisticated daughter had her long hair, not in its usual neat upswept style, but in braids that hung down over her shoulders. And in place of one of her beautiful dresses that had been made specifically for her, Temperance was wearing a plaid skirt that looked as though it had been washed in a mountain stream for the last five years and a rough-textured linen blouse.
But for all that Temperance looked very different, Melanie had never seen her daughter look so full of health.
“Temperance?” Melanie asked, eyes wide.
“Don’t look so shocked,” Temperance said, laughing, as she handed a bowl of what looked like milk to a waiting child.
Melanie looked from Temperance to the goat tethered near her, then back to her daughter, then at the child holding the bowl of milk, then back at her daughter.
“Yes, Mother,” Temperance said, laughing, “I have just finished milking a goat.”
Since Melanie could think of no words to reply to that bit of news, she stood there and stared in openmouthed astonishment at her daughter.
“Would you like a drink of milk?” Temperance asked. “There’s nothing quite like it fresh from the, ah, source.”
“Not really,” Melanie said, backing up. “James’s aunt and I have come here to talk to you two about something important.”
“Of course,” Temperance said, then gave her mother a warm hug, and when she moved away, she kept her arm about her mother, and they started walking down the village road toward the house.
“I have a carriage,” Melanie said, looking out of the corner of her eye at her daughter.
“No, let’s walk, shall we?”
Melanie was further puzzled because her daughter didn’t like to walk anywhere. Temperance said it was faster to go by carriage, and Temperance loved to do everything as quickly as possible. But this Temperance, the one with her hair worn the way she had it when she was twelve, was someone her mother didn’t know.
“What have you been up to!?” Melanie said at last, her voice full of her curiosity.
Temperance laughed, her arm still around her mother’s shoulders. “You held out longer than I thought you would. What do you think of this?” Temperance asked as she pulled away and twirled about in her long, faded skirt. There was a wide leather belt at her waist, fastened with a heavy pewter buckle.
Temperance turned to look at her mother; then, with her eyes on the village and her mother, she started walking backwards. “I’ve had the most extraordinary three days of my life, that’s what’s happened.”
“Milking goats?” Melanie said, an eyebrow raised.
Turning, Temperance looked back up the trail, and she slowed down her walking, for which Melanie was grateful.
“Yes,” Temperance said after a few moments. “I . . .” Trailing off, she looked toward the big house and thought about the last few days; then as they slowly walked along the path, she began to tell her mother about her last days, starting with when Finola’s mother had invited Temperance to dinner.
“It was such a simple thing, but it was extraordinary to me,” Temperance said. “I’m used to dinners and speeches and—”
“But this was ordinary,” Melanie said, watching her daughter closely.
“Yes, it was,” Temperance said with a sigh. “No one cared who I was or what I could do for them. Instead, they were doing things for me.”
“Tell me every detail,” Melanie said eagerly. “Don’t leave out one word.”
At that, words began to tumble out of Temperance as she walked with her mother, sometimes slowly, sometimes backwards, sometimes stopping to look back at the village as she remembered something unusual of the last days.
“I guess that in my line of work it’s easy to see that I could forget that there is happiness in the world,” Temperance said. “I tend to see only the women who’ve had dreadful things happen to them. And the men . . .” She smiled. “I think that sometimes I forget that not all men on the earth are deadbeats or drunks.”
“You told me that James works,” Melanie said softly, but when her daughter’s mouth tightened at that name, Melanie changed the subject. “So you were invited to dinner?”
“Yes,” Temperance said, smiling again. “And I thought it was for a ceremony or something. That’s usually why I’m invited to dinners. But this was just a family dinner, and when my skirt caught on fire, I—”
“What?!”
“I wasn’t hurt, but my dress was ruined, so Finola’s mother pulled this from a trunk and it’s, oh, so comfortable.”
“And quite becoming too.”
“Yes,” Temperance said thoughtfully. “They’re nice people,” she said softly. “They care about anyone they accept as their own. Let me tell you about the children.”
Melanie watched her daughter and listened as she launched into a lovely story of spending a day with the children of McCairn.
“The children said that I’d given them so much that it was their turn to give to me. They said this from their hearts. No adult prompted them to come up with this idea. Can you imagine such a thing?”
Melanie was afraid to reply to that question. From the time her daughter had been fourteen and her father had died, it was as though Temperance had taken a vow to give up all pleasure in life. Sometimes Melanie thought that her daughter believed that she had caused her father’s death, that if she hadn’t been so frivolous, or so concerned with the birthday party of her best friend that day, maybe her father wouldn’t have died. But whatever the cause, since that awful day when Temperance’s father had gasped, then slumped forward on his desk, dead, Temperance had devoted herself to good works and good works only. Melanie knew that her daughter had never attended any party ever again without there being a redeeming theme behind the party.
But now, here was Temperance, at nearly thirty years old, talking as though she were fourteen again and the last years hadn’t happened. She was talking about how the children had shown her birds’ nests and oddly shaped rock outcroppings and tiny hidden springs.
“I think I thought they were deprived because they’d never seen a pair of roller skates,” Temperance said, “but . . .”
“But there are other things besides modern entertainments?”
“Yes,” Temperance said, smiling. “The children are part of each family. They have jobs and responsibilities, and everyone knows about everyone else.”
Temperance paused to take a breath. “And, also, there’s Hamish.”
“HH?” Melanie teased. “Horrible Hamish?”
“I think I misjudged him. He was—at first anyway—he was difficult to like. He’s so pompous, but I’ve discovered that he had the idea that I’m a . . .”
“A big-city girl here to corrupt his charges?”
“Yes, exactly,” Temperance said. “But he works hard for these people, very, very hard. He makes lessons for each child, and he knows exactly what a child is good at and what she or he can’t do. And that’s another thing, he makes no distinction between male or female. I thought his wife gave
him a sleeping draft at night to keep him away from her, but now I think he needs it to make him stop working.”
They were at the big house now, but Melanie wanted to go on listening to her daughter. She’d not seen Temperance so . . . so . . . happily excited, is the only way she could describe it, since . . . well, since before Temperance’s father had died.
But Rowena was standing inside the entryway to the house, and she led them through to the dining room, where James was waiting for them. And the second that Temperance saw James, her good mood left her. Of course it didn’t help that James looked Temperance up and down, his eyes wide in surprise to see her in braids and tartan, then gave a little sneer and said, “Mixing with the heathens?” and in the next second Melanie thought they were going to get into a fistfight.
With a great sigh, Melanie took a seat at the table and waited for Rowena to begin.
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” Temperance said. “Who could write such a stupid will?”
“A man has a right to do whatever he wants with his own property,” James said, glaring at Temperance, his lips in a tight line.
They were sitting at the dining table in James’s house in McCairn, a fire glowing in the hearth. Across the table from them were James’s aunt Rowena and Temperance’s mother, Melanie. The two women had just told James and Temperance of the will that said that James must marry for love before his thirty-fifth birthday or he loses everything.
Temperance had sat there blinking in disbelief when she’d been told of the will, not really able to comprehend what her mother was saying.
“He can have it,” James said, his arms crossed over his chest. “Let Colin have the bloody place. Welcome to it.”
That brought Temperance out of her thoughts. “You have to be the most selfish man in the world,” she said under her breath, glaring at him. She hadn’t seen much of him in the last weeks, not since the night they had . . . That they had . . .
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