Lord of Sin

by Madeline Hunter

  He led Michael down into the valley, anticipating little welcome when he intruded. He had not written or contacted Cameron because that would give the man a chance to rebuff him. The last thing Ewan wanted was a recalcitrant victim prolonging the “making right” that needed doing.

  Duty. Duty. He had been practicing that chant for two weeks now, ever since the ceremony at the House of Lords. Nothing like donning a coronet to carve the desolate message in stone. He was no longer Ewan McLean, man about town, gambler and drinker, lover extraordinaire and host of some of London’s finest orgies.

  Now he was a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and paterfamilias to a passel of relatives whose names he had made it a point never to know.

  Worse, what had recently been an unremarkable life had now become notorious. Society had long ago ceased to notice his behavior, but suddenly it was grist for the rumor mill again. He had heard that already some unimaginative wag had dubbed him the “Lord of Sindale.”

  What a ludicrous development it had all been. The only good thing about this journey, and it was small consolation, was that it removed him from London, where several mothers of eligible daughters had sent him invitations to parties at houses that had never before received him.

  He might be notorious, but now he was a notorious earl. Ladies who should know better apparently had no qualms about throwing their virginal daughters in the Lord of Sindale’s path.

  “I thought you said it would be a hovel. A dark, drafty, ancient cottage.” Michael’s blond head turned and he glanced back with resentment at the packhorse he had been dragging. “You made me bring good linens and soap, but it looks to be a house that will have its own.”

  It did look to be such a house. Uncle Duncan had said he ruined Cameron, but this house was the nicest one they had passed in many miles. It was not some thatched, wattle-and-daub cottage huddled in a township of others like it. This house was situated on its own and built of stone with two levels. It had attractive plantings all around it. A large stable stood to the north and a carriage waited out in front.

  Perhaps the family hung on to their pride through the property. Maybe they were one of those families that eats nothing but soup in order to keep up appearances.

  “I say, sir, what is happening down there? Those people upstream?”

  Ewan looked past the house to the congregation of dots about two hundred yards behind it. He hoped to heaven that he had not arrived on some festival day, or in the middle of a party or celebration. He really was not in the mood.

  Since it appeared the household was busy by the stream, he and Michael passed the house and headed for the dots. They took on forms as they neared. A little group was watching something transpiring among three men.

  Two of the men began walking away in opposite directions. Ewan was impressed by the determined expression of the blond-haired one heading his way. Then he noticed the pistols.

  It was a duel.

  The man coming toward him was much too young to be Angus Cameron. He looked to be no more than about eighteen. Ewan examined the other figure, the one heading in the other direction.

  Cameron was dressed bizarrely, like someone in a Restoration costume drama. Boots, pantaloons, and a red doublet covered his body. He was tall and wiry, and his spry step implied the years had not taken much toll.

  He wore a flamboyant brown hat with a broad brim and big red plume. It appeared this old man wore his ancestor’s garments and had never purchased any of his own. Definitely eccentric, as Duclairc’s father had said. Or too poor to hire a tailor. Well, it could have been worse. He could have been wearing Druid robes.

  The pacing stopped. The red plume swished the air as Cameron turned. Ewan saw the face under the upturned right brim of the hat.

  This was definitely not Angus Cameron.

  It was a woman. Her steely expression made her appear hard and wise, but the face itself was fairly young.

  The blond man turned, too. Pistols rose.

  Jesus.

  Ewan kicked his horse and galloped forward. Women in the little group cried out as he sped past. His thundering approach made the duelists pause long enough for him to pull up his horse between them.

  He glared at the young man. “Good God, that is a woman over there. What are you thinking?”

  “Ah’m thinkin’ to shoot her ’fore she kills me.”

  “The hell you will. Stand down.”

  “Who are ye to interfere, mon?” The crisp, feminine demand bit into Ewan’s ear.

  He turned. The doublet and pantaloons hung loosely, but not so much that her curves were totally obscured. Wisps of curly red hair escaped the hat into which she had stuffed her locks. Her face was very lovely, with skin showing the translucent whiteness that marks a true Scottish beauty. Her bowed raspberry mouth and her delicately boned oval face competed with her jade eyes for his attention.

  “I am Lyndale.” It was the first time he had used the title to presume rights to do things that were none of his business.

  “I hae ne’er heard o’ye. Now, move the horse so we can be done with this.” She waved her pistol toward the southern hills, to emphasize just how far away he should go.

  “You will not be done with this while I am here.”

  “Then leave. Gae on to where ye were headed.”

  “Since this glen is on the road to nowhere, it should be obvious that I was headed right here. Put down that gun, woman.”

  “Nae. Jamie MacKay has dishonored my sister.” The plume angled toward a young girl in a brown cape with big, frightened eyes. “She is too young and stupid to ken the ways of men. He has been after her for months, and talked her into meeting him last night. Now, move yer horse so I can kill him.”

  Ewan eyed Jamie MacKay.

  “Did you have her, boy?”

  Jamie shook his head emphatically. Ewan shot a look at the girl in question. She shook her head, too.

  He returned his attention to the older sister. “I said to put the gun down.”

  “The hell I will. Move yer horse’s arse.”

  He dismounted and patted the horse’s arse so it would indeed move. He walked toward the pointing gun. “Your sister says it did not go too far. You should believe her. Put down the pistol or shoot me, because I will not move out of the way.”

  Her green eyes sparked with tiny lightning bolts. For a moment he thought she might actually shoot. Deciding not to take the gamble that she was only half crazy but basically sane, Ewan flashed out his hand, gripped her wrist, and raised her arm up high. He pried the gun from her grasp with his other hand.

  “Who are ye to stick yer nose into this? Mind yer own—”

  He ignored her ravings and walked back to Jamie MacKay. The boy was looking far too relieved. A touch of smugness was inching on to his face.

  Ewan only had two rules where women were concerned. No friends’ wives, and no innocents. If the dishonor of the latter’s seductions was obvious to him, of all men, he assumed it was abundantly clear to others.

  “You did not have her, but you intended to,” Ewan said quietly with a man-to-man smile.

  Jamie could not entirely suppress a roguish grin.

  Ewan swung his right fist. It landed in the young man’s stomach with a satisfying thud. Breath whooshed out. The little group gasped in unison and Jamie fell to his knees. Ewan swung again, connecting with the pale face. Jamie fell back.

  “Are you his second?” Ewan asked another young man who rushed over.

  “His brother. Our father sent me lookin’ for him when he didna come home last night. I got here just as she was bringing him out for this duel. Good thing he isna dead. That would take some explaining, what with the challenger being a woman.”

  “Yes, I expect that would be hard for the family to live down. Get him out of here before she finds another pistol.”

  “Get him oot o’ here,” a voice echoed at his shoulder. “Put him in yer father’s fancy carriage and take him home and make sure he and all the
others like him ken that the Cameron sisters arna their sluts for the takin’.”

  Ewan glanced at the plume and hat. She was very tall. Evidently she was also one of those irritating women who had to have the last word.

  He ignored the feminine fury beside him and waved the boys away. Jamie staggered under his brother’s arm toward the house. A bevy of cloaks strolled after them, subtly opening to absorb Michael and the horses. Ewan fell into step at the back of the procession.

  Boots suddenly paced next to his. “Where are ye goin’?”

  He kept walking and did not look at her. If he did they would get into a row, with her accusing him of interfering, which he had done, and his calling her a lunatic, which evidence indicated she was. He did note, however, how the legs that moved the boots looked quite slender from the knee up, despite the pantaloons.

  Long legs. He had a lot of practice in imagining women without any clothes, and his mind’s eye now saw the knees and thighs of this one, snowy white and naked.

  He resisted the temptation to picture the rest of her. “I am going to this house to call on Mr. Angus Cameron. Would he be your grandfather?”

  “My faither. What dae ye want with him?”

  “I have important business to conduct with him. I have journeyed all the way from London to attend to it.”

  “That is a lang journey to accomplish nae mair than saving the sorry hide of Jamie MacKay. Ye should o’ written. I could o’ let ye know that Angus Cameron is dead. Has been these five years noo.”

  Ewan stopped walking. Wonderful. Just like Uncle Duncan to give him a mission, to provide directions, to demand action, but to forget to check whether the victim of the great sin was even still alive. It was a wonder he had not arrived in the glen to find the homestead in decay and the whole Cameron family living in Brazil.

  On the other hand, the promise had not been about Angus alone. This news of Angus’s death hardly relieved him of the obligation.

  “I am sorry to hear that your father has passed. I will speak with your mother or brother, then.”

  “If I had a brother, do ye think I’d be fighting duels that he could fight?”

  “Well, you appeared to be enjoying it so much.”

  “Listen, Mr. . . . um . . .”

  “I am Ewan, Earl of Lyndale.” He had considered never demanding use of his title from anyone. However, right now, with this particular anyone, he enjoyed demanding it enormously.

  “Well, Lord Lyndale, I didna enjoy it. It was necessary, however. There’s those like Jamie who think my sisters are without protection, that no one will stop them if they try something, or call them out. Now I’ve reminded them all that isna so. I expect we will have a lot less trouble with such things for some months to come.”

  He barely heard her. His concentration had been distracted by how changeable her eyes were. Right now they appeared like emeralds, full of lively facets and sparks. And her skin was really very beautiful, quite fragile-looking, like the finest japon paper. She was not a girl, but probably in her latter twenties, and that made her beauty even more appealing.

  “Are you saying there is no male relative here to protect your sisters? No cousin or husband?”

  “Nae. It falls to me.”

  Ewan looked toward the house and the disappearing cloaks. It suddenly struck him that all the spectators had been women. “No male servant whom you could trust to guard the gate, so to speak?”

  She chuckled, low and velvety. She shook her head, as if she had never met such a stupid man. “Well, now, that is like inviting a fox to guard the henhouse. Nae, sir, I am the best protection they have, such as it is. If ye came all this way to conduct business, ye are stuck with me for that, too. I am the head of this family now.”

  Ewan inwardly sighed. Somehow he did not think that last pronouncement would be good news for his mission. He would much rather deal with an eccentric old man than a crazy young woman.

  Duty called nonetheless. He’d deal with this responsibility forthwith. With luck, he would be on his way back to London in the morning.

  Bride put Lord Lyndale in the library, sent his manservant to the stables with the horses, then hurried up to her chamber to change. As she tried to tame her hair into something that might have been fashionable at some point in history, Mary slipped into the room.

  Bride looked in the mirror at Mary’s downcast eyes. The morning’s episode had been all Mary’s doing, and Bride was not convinced that her youngest sister was nearly as contrite as she now appeared.

  “Were ye really going to kill him?”

  “Nae. I was only going to scare him good.”

  “I told ye nothing happened. That Lord Lyndale was right and ye should have listened to me.”

  Bride stuck some combs in her hair to hold the hopeless mass of long curls back from her face. “Dinna tell me nothing happened. I am the one who found ye, remember? He had yer dress half off and his mouth where only a wee bairn’s or a husband’s should ever be.” She turned and wagged her brush at Mary. “Ye have nae fortune and nae dowry. Nae MacKay son is going to marry ye. He will take what he can get and then disappear into the mist, and there is no father or brother to make him do what is right by ye.”

  Mary nodded her blond head while her lips folded in with chagrin. Bride was not reassured. She had given this lecture to Mary before. The plain fact was, Mary was too pretty, and at sixteen years of age, already too appreciative of a man’s touch and smile.

  Well, nothing new there. It ran in the family.

  “When ye go down, tell Jilly that I think Lord Lyndale intends to stay for dinner. With luck, I’ll have him gone before the evening meal, however.”

  “Do ye think he has come from the duchess?”

  “Nae.” When she first saw the fine horse and the expensive coat, that was exactly what she had thought, however. She had come close to turning her pistol on him.

  Only, the Duchess of Sutherland did not send lords to do her dirty work. Nor did she send her factors to explain her actions in advance. They arrived unexpectedly, sometimes in the middle of the night, to clear tenants off her lands so she could give the farms over to the sheep herds that made her rich.

  For years she and her husband had been doing that to the south and west in Sutherland. “Agricultural improvements,” they called it. Now they had bought this county, too, and were seeking to “improve” it, as well.

  The death last summer of the Duke of Sutherland had not stopped the clearances. Two townships had been burned out in an eastern glen last month. Bride and her sisters had watched the displaced families straggle toward the poverty waiting on the coast. A woman who had given birth on the road was buried with her bairn in the nearby town’s churchyard.

  She prayed that this farm would be spared. She hoped that if the duchess’s men came to clear them out, she could convince them to allow her and her sisters to stay in the house, even if the land was taken.

  Mary took over with the combs and managed to make some progress. “Lord Lyndale is very handsome. Dinna ye think so?”

  Bride definitely thought so. She already had a long list of the man’s faults, and his looks were at the top of it. A face like that usually meant a man assumed he could have whatever he wanted in the world. Combine that with a title and you had nothing but condescension and arrogance.

  “It was very thrilling how he just took command,” Mary said.

  “I am thinking that I need to marry ye off soon, dove. I’ll find ye a handsome, masterful man whom ye can admire for two months before ye grow up and understand what that means for a wife. Then for the rest of yer days ye can serve his every whim and cry yer eyes out when he goes to his other women.”

  Mary mumbled something. Bride’s ears burned. It had sounded like “a lot ye ken about it.”

  Bride let the mumble pass. Mary was alluding to Bride’s own questionable judgment with men. The mutter caused a pang of worry and nostalgia in her heart, even as it made her sigh over Mary’s willfulness.


  Raising Mary had been the biggest responsibility among the many she shouldered. It was a miracle Mary had even been born, however, and that meant she had indulged her as a child and was paying for the laxity now. Angus had been old when Bride came, and very old at Mary’s birth. Their mother’s health could not bear the strain of the last lying in, and at twelve years of age, Bride had been left with three wee sisters and an elderly father to care for.

  Jumping now, moving fast, she pulled on a dress and turned for Mary to fasten it.

  “I canna take the time to scold ye further, Mary. I have to hurry downstairs. Lyndale didna come from Sutherland, but he could be here for more dangerous reasons. He said he was from London, which could mean trouble. He might even be here for the government.”

  Mary’s eyes widened. “You doona think that—”

  “What other business could he think to have with our dead father?”

  She thought about that man sitting in the library. She wondered if he was so bold as to poke around in the writing table there. Or, worse, wander through the house.

  “Go down and thank his lordship for saving Jamie’s life. Distract him for a few minutes. I had better do something before I join him. And, Mary, tell the others there is to be no Gaelic or Scots spoken in the earl’s presence. We will speak book English like he does, so he daesna think we are ignorant or easily guiled.”

  Bride slipped down the stairs and into the drawing room across from the library.

  She had not put Lord Lyndale here because this room was not used for entertaining. Long tables lined the northern wall beneath the windows. Four chairs were set at intervals, and each place held implements. Not eating utensils, but burins and awls and metal rockers.

  Only one place was being used this morning. Her sister Anne sat near the window with the best light. She held no burin, but a quill pen. Her head was bent over a square sheet of paper.