Beguiled

by Joanna Chambers

  He’d changed over the last two years—filled out. Now he was positively brawny. Tall and burly, more like Peter now. Less a boy and more a man.

  David made himself move forward, taking the hand the other man offered in a brief grasp. “It’s been a long time,” David said, his expression carefully neutral.

  Euan opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so, Elizabeth interrupted.

  “I was just saying to Mr. MacLennan that he looked familiar. I take it he’s a friend of yours, Mr. Lauriston?”

  So, Euan had introduced himself already.

  “And I was about to answer Lady Kinnell that she and I saw one another at an assembly I attended a few years ago in the Assembly Rooms. I was with you, Davy. Do you remember?” Euan turned his head to smile down at Elizabeth. “We were not formally introduced that evening. I was too embarrassed to dance or speak with any ladies. Davy spent most of the night trying to persuade me to do so, to no avail.”

  It bore a passing resemblance to the truth, David supposed, though his only reason for suggesting Euan dance had been to enable the lad to ask the questions that might lead him to Hugh Swinburne.

  “How foolish,” Elizabeth said, laughing somewhat nervously. “Well, you can make up for your past misdemeanours by joining this party and speaking with all the ladies. What do you think, Mr. Lauriston?” She glanced at David, a question in her dark gaze. For that moment, she was almost the old Elizabeth, though there was something a little withdrawn about her still.

  That rare and welcome glimpse of the girl he remembered, however fleeting, distracted David, and he smiled at her, even as Balfour’s warnings about being seen with Euan MacLennan resonated in his mind. Giving no hint of those thoughts, he told her, “I think it’s an excellent idea.” Then he turned his attention back to Euan and added, “Well, don’t hover there in the doorway, come in.”

  Waving Elizabeth ahead, then Euan, David took up the rear himself.

  “You can leave your hat on the table there,” he told Euan, waving at the hall table. “Everyone’s in the parlour.”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Euan protested, though he took his hat off and set it on the table as directed.

  “You’re not intruding,” David murmured with automatic politeness. “We’re only waiting to see the procession.” Even as he spoke the words, it occurred to him to wonder whether Euan was being followed, if someone, one of Peel’s men, was watching them now, noting David’s address down and marking him as a possible sympathiser to radical causes.

  “So, how did you find me?” David asked as he led the way to the front room where the other guests were.

  “I called at your old rooms, and a woman there gave me your direction,” Euan explained. “These rooms are much nicer. You must be doing well, Davy.”

  David glanced at the younger man, but there appeared to be no sarcasm in his tone or expression.

  “I’ve been working hard.”

  “You always did,” Euan replied with a smile.

  David wasn’t sure how to take that. “Ale?” he offered shortly.

  “Ah, yes, thank you.”

  “Let’s get you something to eat, Mr. MacLennan,” Elizabeth suggested on Euan’s other side. “Mr. Lauriston’s table has something to tempt everyone, I’m sure.”

  While David fetched Euan’s ale, Elizabeth led him to the sideboard where the food lay to help him select some repast. When David joined them there, he was just in time to hear Elizabeth ask, “And what is it you do, Mr. MacLennan?”

  Euan put down the little meat pie he’d been about to bite into.

  “I’m a journalist,” he said, taking the cup David proffered with a murmur of thanks.

  “A journalist?” Elizabeth repeated. “How interesting. Do you write for a particular periodical?”

  For a long moment, Euan paused; then, casting a quick glance at David, he said, “You may not have heard of it. Flint’s Political Register.”

  David saw that Elizabeth had heard of it, all right—and who had not? Her dark eyes widened fractionally before she nodded.

  Flint’s was a London paper, a radical periodical. With twice the subscribers of Blackwood’s, it was highly popular amongst the lower classes, and hated by the government.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Elizabeth said carefully. “But I thought—I thought it had been closed down.” She seemed more curious than condemnatory.

  “It’s been closed down several times actually,” Euan replied. “Every time they close us down, we start up again. Tom Gilmour, who founded it, has been in prison almost a twelvemonth. His wife managed to keep it going for a while after he went in. Then she was jailed too, just last month. Her sister has taken up the mantle for now, and if—or when—she is arrested, the rest of us will keep it going. The people need—”

  He broke off. Perhaps he’d noticed David’s gaze flickering around them, checking if any of the other guests were listening. When their eyes met, his expression was part mortification, part defiance. “Sorry. I shouldn’t—I’m an uninvited guest...”

  The brief, tense silence was broken by Elizabeth. “I hope you’re not apologising on my account,” she said. “I’ve never met a journalist before. Are you in Edinburgh to write a story?”

  That adept little question—a change of direction rather than subject—was typically astute of Elizabeth, and Euan answered gratefully.

  “Yes. I’ll be writing a series of articles on the King’s visit to Scotland, actually.” He didn’t need to add that the tone of those articles would be quite different from the fawning flattery of some of the more respectable periodicals. If the articles were to be published by Flint’s Political Register, they would be decidedly republican in tone.

  “Ah, now I see why you visited Mr. Lauriston today,” Elizabeth said with a little twinkle in her eye. “You are no better than the rest of us here, begging a bit of a view.”

  Euan laughed, even as he appeared discomfited by her teasing, shifting a little on his feet. “In my defence, I wasn’t expecting the view to be quite so good as this. Davy’s come up in the world since last I saw him.”

  Before David could decide whether the words were a compliment or an accusation, Catherine’s voice rang out over the murmured conversations in the room.

  “Oh, do come and see, everyone! They’re moving at last!”

  David’s guests rushed to the window of the parlour. It was plain that it would be impossible for everyone to get a view, notwithstanding that it was a double window and the ladies had obligingly removed their bonnets.

  “I’ve a smaller window in my study that a few of us could watch from,” David suggested to the people craning their necks at the back. “Follow me.”

  He walked down the short length of the hall and opened the door to his study at the end, holding it open for the small group that had followed him: Elizabeth, Euan and a married couple, the Beggs.

  “Oh good! We shall end up having a much better view with just five of us!” Mrs. Begg said happily.

  “Ladies to the front, I should think,” Begg said, raising the sash. His wife rushed forward, giggling with excitement, and he stationed himself behind her as though he were her personal bodyguard, turning to Elizabeth to add, “There’s plenty of room at the front, my lady. We gentlemen shall stand at the back.”

  Elizabeth shuffled forward, seeming uncomfortable. For an instant, David wondered why; then he didn’t have to wonder. She gave away the reason all by herself, with the hand that went to her neck to tug her stiff collar up a little higher. He wondered if he’d have noticed what she sought to hide if she hadn’t made that betraying little gesture. As it was, he couldn’t help but notice the dark, purplish bruises there, distinctly placed by a hand, the visible bruise-smudges of the fingers on one side and the print of a thumb on the other. It must have been a cruel grip—and recent—to leave such livid marks.

  David saw that Euan had plainly seen the marks too—he was frowning. Euan glanced at David, partl
y as though to check that he too had seen what looked like evidence of abuse, and partly as though seeking an explanation. David shook his head in demonstration of his ignorance, but he couldn’t help remembering Balfour’s words about Elizabeth’s husband as his eyes were drawn again to the back of her neck.

  Such a little neck. Though women had never roused his passions, he was not unaffected by them. He appreciated the tender curves of them, the promise they held of succour and safety and home. Looking at Elizabeth’s bruised flesh brought David’s protective instincts to the fore and made him feel sick to his very stomach. How could a man put violent hands on a woman?

  On Elizabeth, of all women?

  Chapter Four

  It took forty-five minutes for the procession to work its way past David’s windows on its way up to the castle.

  The Beggs enjoyed it to the full. Especially Mrs. Begg, who oohed and ahhed, who pointed out which clans each contingent of highlanders was from—she appeared to have memorised all the tartans—and breathlessly intoned the names of the more important personages as they passed, particularly the mounted clan chiefs in their full regalia.

  “Look at Sir Evan MacGregor,” she breathed as the MacGregor clan swept by in a torrent of scarlet. “Have you ever seen anyone so handsome in all your life, Lady Kinnell?”

  “Present company excepted, no,” Elizabeth replied, a smile in her voice.

  “Oh well, of course!” Mrs. Begg replied, giggling. “Kenneth knows I esteem him above all others, don’t you, my love? But Sir Evan’s costume is just so dashing.”

  “I shall have to purchase one just like it,” Mr. Begg replied. “Can you imagine me, Lauriston, addressing the Lord President in tartan and eagle feathers?”

  “I would pay good money to see it,” David said, and everyone laughed.

  “And there is Lord Murdoch Balfour,” Mrs. Begg went on. “Do you see him, Kenneth? On the black horse?”

  David’s heart began to beat in his throat at the sound of that name. It was almost a fortnight since he’d run into the man at the tailor shop, and every day he thought of their last conversation.

  “You know where my house is. Come anytime...”

  He thought about that invitation, every day. But he hadn’t gone. The memory of how he’d felt two years before, after they’d parted, lingered still. The blackness that had descended on him afterwards. The long, endless downhill from the mountain. Down and down.

  He feared to tread that black descent again.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Euan studying him—Euan recognised Balfour’s name, of course—but David didn’t turn his head. He kept looking forward, letting his gaze roam over the riders below, until, at last, he picked out Balfour, tall and elegant on his midnight steed.

  David was as sceptical as it was possible to be about this ceremony. He’d watched hundreds of troops pass to the patriotic sound of bagpipes and drums without feeling the slightest bit moved. But when he saw Balfour, dressed far less flamboyantly than Sir Evan MacGregor, in dark-green-and-blue tartan, he felt a stirring in his breast for the first time all day.

  It wasn’t with patriotism, though. It was with a far more personal feeling.

  “Oh, he’s like Young Lochinvar,” Mrs. Begg breathed, and they all laughed again, David too. And it was funny, except...except that she was right.

  So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war

  There never was knight like the young Lochinvar...

  Inwardly, David groaned. Was he a lassie to be thinking such nonsense?

  He’d spent the last two years trying to forget Lord Murdo Balfour, certain he’d never see the man again. It had been over a year before he’d given in to his old weakness, scared that touching another man, or being touched, would stir up memories he wanted to forget.

  That fear had been unfounded, as it happened. His first lapse hadn’t reminded him of Balfour at all, nor any of the few times after that. Those furtive, anonymous encounters had borne no relation to being with Balfour. David scarcely spoke to any of those men, scarcely even looked at them. He’d certainly never looked at any of them as he was looking at Balfour now, with his heart kicking a determined tattoo in his chest and his breath coming shallow and quick at the mere sight of him, down on the street below on his black steed.

  “You know where my house is.”

  “Goodness me, it is Lord Murdo!” Elizabeth said then. “Do you remember him, Mr. Lauriston?” She turned her head and caught his eye, forcing him to reluctantly look away from Balfour’s departing figure. “You dined with him at my father’s house once. Do you recall?”

  “Ah—yes, I believe I do,” David confirmed.

  “Do you know,” Euan said in a tone that held an audible note of amusement, “I think I recognise him too.”

  David glanced at Euan, a slight frown drawing his brows together in warning—Euan was perfectly well aware of Lord Murdo Balfour’s identity. Balfour had been with David that night two years before, had bargained with Euan after David’s reckless intervention. There was no way he could have forgotten him.

  Euan feigned puzzlement, a finger on his lips. “Was he possibly at the assembly we talked about earlier? The one Lady Kinnell was at?”

  David stayed silent, letting Euan know he wasn’t happy, but Elizabeth interjected, unwittingly rescuing the younger man.

  “I believe he was at that assembly, Mr. MacLennan. I remember I had to dance with him, and it was terribly nerve-racking! Mother had persuaded herself he was looking for a wife, and she was being utterly impossible that night.”

  “Looking for a fancy son-in-law, was she?” Mr. Begg asked with jolly tactlessness.

  Elizabeth’s smile faded a little, but she answered him with a show of good humour that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yes. Well, she got her wish in the end. Though not with Lord Murdo Balfour.”

  She turned back to face the window then, her shoulders and back tense, and the thumbprint bruise at the nape of her neck livid. David glanced at Euan, who looked grim. Of course, he’d been looking fairly grim throughout the whole procession. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look that he didn’t find the spectacle as stirring as David’s other guests. Perhaps he saw it as a demonstration of the power of the state—all that military might being displayed in honour of the monarch of the United Kingdoms of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

  David’s view of the procession was probably closer to Euan’s than to that of the patriotic Beggs. Yet he’d hosted this celebration. Brought in food and wine and played the part of a loyal subject of the King. Well, he was loyal, wasn’t he? Certainly in deed, if not in thought. He was a respectable man, part of the machinery that upheld the rule of law, even when he tried to fight its effect. Like when he’d represented Euan’s brother. He’d tried his damnedest, within the bounds of the law, to prevent Peter MacLennan being transported, but it hadn’t been enough.

  What a man could do within the law was rarely enough, and that was the hell of it.

  Once the procession was over, and while the formal ceremony to hand over the Regalia was being conducted in the castle, David’s small party returned to the other guests in the parlour. David circulated the room, offering his guests more refreshments. While he topped the ladies’ glasses with wine punch, Ferguson refreshed the men’s ale, and Catherine replenished some of the empty plates on the sideboard from the kitchen.

  David’s guests were jolly by now, some even becoming a little silly. Hardly surprising when they were tippling before noon. Despite his sociable demeanour, David didn’t feel jolly, though. He felt too sober, untouched by the ale he’d drunk and out of step with his guests’ merriness, and it wasn’t just the alcohol or his distaste for the pageantry bothering him.

  Once David had been round all the other guests, he approached Euan and Elizabeth. They stood a little apart, talking together, their heads bent close. He felt, oddly, like an intruder as he drew near.

  “Would you like some more lemonade, Lady K
innell? Or more ale for you, Mr. MacLennan?”

  They looked up simultaneously, both of them seeming surprised to see him standing there for an instant before they each began to refuse his offer, their words tumbling together then petering out into awkward silence.

  After a pause, Elizabeth said, more collectedly, “Mr. MacLennan was just telling me about the people he works with.”

  “Oh yes?” David looked at Euan enquiringly.

  “I was telling Lady Kinnell about Mr. and Mrs. Gilmour, the owners of Flint’s,” Euan said, a hint of defiance in his tone, as though he thought David wouldn’t approve. “I was explaining that it was Mr. Gilmour who founded the paper, but Mrs. Gilmour is just as involved. As we all are. It is a collective endeavour. We all have a say-so in what happens.”

  He glanced at Elizabeth. “I wish you could meet them,” he said. “They are a most unusual couple.”

  Elizabeth tilted her head to the side. “Oh? Why is that?”

  “They live as equal partners,” Euan said. “They drew up an agreement before their marriage that whatever the law might say, Mrs. Gilmour’s property was to remain her own, that her rights over their children would be equal to her husband’s, and that she owed him no obligation to obey his commands.”

  Elizabeth was silent for a moment; then she said, sounding bewildered, “Why would they do that?”

  “They believe that Woman should not be Man’s slave,” Euan said simply. “And if I ever marry, I will do just as they have done. If I marry, I don’t want a domestic slave.”

  “No?”

  “No. Man’s oppression of Woman is the first, and worst, act of oppression in human history. Until we repair that, how can we repair the other inequalities all around us? Every child grows up witnessing this most grievous form of slavery. We drink it in with our mothers’ milk and take it for the natural order. But it is not.”

  Elizabeth swallowed, as though past a lump, her pale throat working almost painfully. She looked away, averting her face.