by Karen Ranney
“Do?” he asked, handing her back the letter. He hoped to God she burned it. Knowing his mother, however, he knew she wouldn’t. If he didn’t handle the situation, it would only continue to concern her.
“I’ll go and see her,” he said, the decision only seconds old. “When I go to Inverness in a few days.”
“Do you think that wise? Wouldn’t it be better to send Edmonds?” she asked, referring to the Russells’ solicitor.
“And have Edmonds give me that superior stare? I think not.”
He bent and kissed her on the cheek, and left before she could say anything further.
After Nan left, Lorna retrieved her father’s book from beneath the sagging mattress. A Manual of Botany of Scotland: Being an Introduction to the Study of the Structure, Physiology, and Classification of Scottish Herbal Plants and Related Treatments was the product of a decade of her father’s study.
She’d nearly finished the remaining illustrations and had written to several of her father’s friends, men who initially expressed enthusiasm about the idea of the completed manuscript. Unfortunately, of the three men she’d written, only one had responded, and his letter was three pages of complaints about his ill health. Only one sentence referred to her inquiry. All he’d written was, “Due to the nature of my health, my dear, I am unable to assist you in soliciting a publisher.”
She supposed she could write the other two men again, but she didn’t have as much hope as when she began the project. Had she misinterpreted everything? Had those comments his peers made at her father’s funeral only been words of kindness? Had they no faith in his work?
She’d been told that her father was a great botanist. She knew he’d spent most of his life studying the flora of Scotland. He’d trudged through marshes and bogs, over glens and mountain crags. After her mother died, she’d followed him from one desolate outcropping to another, learning at his side. She’d sat, patiently, as he spoke to wise women and old men smoking a pipe in front of crowded shops. He’d written down recipes, learned how to concoct various remedies, and painstakingly reformulated them in the hopes of keeping such traditions alive.
“Once upon a time, Lorna,” he told her, “we had no physicians or hospitals. We trusted in those who were attuned to nature and the earth. It’s knowledge we’re losing each day.”
She would faithfully copy down each recipe, watch as he prepared them, and then transcribe his notes beside her pictures of each herb.
If, on his expeditions, he occasionally forgot she was there, she didn’t mind. She understood his preoccupation and occupied herself with her drawings.
When he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, one April morning after they’d just arrived in Inverness, she was shocked at how few coins stood between her and poverty. The innkeeper’s wife, knowing her predicament and feeling some compassion, had recommended her to Mrs. McDermott, the housekeeper at Blackhall.
If she’d known then what she knew now, she would have gladly entered the poorhouse instead. At least she wouldn’t be pregnant and she would never have met the Duke of Kinross.
Chapter 6
Alex entered his suite, heading for the dressing room.
“Don’t hover,” he said to Matthews when his valet made an appearance at the door. “I’ve just come to change my shirt before I leave.”
“More soot, sir?”
“More soot, Matthews.”
“It’s devilish hard for the laundress to remove the stains.”
He glanced at his valet. Did the man realize they were having this conversation with increasing regularity lately or that Matthews was beginning to sound chiding? His mother didn’t even employ that tone. Matthews could take some lessons from the Dowager Duchess.
“Then you’ll just have to order some extra shirts for me,” he said. “That isn’t a problem, is it?”
“Of course not, Your Grace.”
He doubted it would be. He’d long suspected that Matthews received a bonus from the tailor based on the number of garments he ordered. He discovered the transactions when reviewing his expenses for the last quarter. What Matthews hadn’t figured out was that the tailor tacked the amount he paid the valet onto the cost of the shirts, effectively making Alex pay for the bonus.
He allowed the situation only because he hadn’t wanted to interview for a new valet, but he disliked being played for a fool. A thought that brought her to the forefront of his mind.
Was Lorna Gordon the same woman he’d encountered at the fancy dress ball? Had she been responsible for the single most erotic interlude of his life?
Was she Marie?
If she was, she was trying to take advantage of the situation.
He didn’t believe a word of the note he’d read: that the writer was a friend and that her main concern was for the child he’d fathered.
What pap.
He couldn’t have sired a child from that one occasion. Marie had appeared to be a virgin, but that might have been either the whiskey or some sort of ruse.
He wished he hadn’t drunk so much. He’d not touched a drop of liquor since, his abstinence a penance for the excesses of that night.
He’d been a fool and he was paying for it now, wasn’t he?
It was one thing to attempt to blackmail him, but she’d made her biggest mistake by involving his mother. Because she’d done so, he would see her well and truly ruined.
He glanced over at Matthews, expecting his valet to be performing a dignified pout, but the man surprised him.
“Are you certain you don’t wish me to accompany you to Inverness, Your Grace?”
“Not this time. I’ll only be gone a few days.”
He turned away and finished removing the shirt. He held out his hand and Matthews, with perfect valet timing, placed a crisp white shirt in his grip, standing by in case he lost his mind and could no longer manage buttons.
Once he was ready, he made a mental check of his valise, determined that everything was in readiness for the trip to Inverness, and left the dressing room.
As he passed through the sitting room, Alex hesitated at the window. Here he could see Russell land stretching to the other side of Loch Gerry and to the far glens. For a moment he stood there, letting the sight fill him.
Never a day passed that he failed to see its beauty or to be grateful that it was his to steward and manage.
Sir Walter Scott’s words in The Lay of the Last Minstrel came to mind:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself has said,
This is my own, my native land!
This was his land, his home, his heritage, and he felt the bond every day of his life.
He left the suite, leaving Matthews to follow with his bag. Only then did his valet express his annoyance with the travel arrangements by sighing loudly and dramatically.
Alex bit back his impatience, concentrating on the sights around him.
Mrs. McDermott made sure every inch of Blackhall was in pristine condition. He appreciated the housekeeper and made sure she knew it, giving her a Christmas stipend that ensured she couldn’t be lured away from the castle.
A genuinely pleasant person, Mrs. McDermott never failed to give excellent service and to do so without whining. Perhaps he should ask her for a valet recommendation. Matthews had been with him for years, but lately the man’s behavior was grating.
His mother was right, they had lost a few maids recently. Sometimes, the lure of factory jobs in the city proved to be detrimental to their staffing requirements.
If they needed to increase their wages to entice new servants, he would have to review the situation. He didn’t mind spending the money, but he wanted to ensure that the older staff members didn’t feel as if they’d been cheated. He wanted harmony in all his homes and especially at Blackhall, where he spent most of his time.
He descended the staircase designed by Sir William Bruce a hundred fifty years ago when the older part of the castle had been renovated. Howeve
r many times he saw it, he was always in awe of the engineering that had created the masterpiece. It reminded him of the curve of a shell, the inspiration for the gilded iron of the banister and the carved balusters. The staircase curved tightly onto itself, giving a panoramic view of the floors above and below. From here he could see the full entryway as well as the French doors in the rear of the main building leading to the terraced gardens.
At the bottom of the stairs he turned left, making his way down the wide corridor and to the east wing. Pushing open the door to his office, he entered a room filled with two desks, chairs, and three tables set in front of the windows.
His apprentice sat at one of the tables, hunched on a stool, a magnifying glass in one hand and a small card in the other. Jason was the son of Blackhall’s head gardener and possessed of keen eyesight and a disregard of time that matched Alex’s. He never caviled about putting in long hours. Nor did he have any outside interests other than his work. He was the perfect apprentice, eager to please, industrious, and intelligent.
If Alex faulted the young man for anything, it was that he was a little too perfect. Such people invariably disappointed.
Jason’s hair was the color of straw, some strands lighter, as if the sun had bleached them. Until he’d offered the boy a position as his apprentice, Jason had spent nearly every day with his father, learning the gardening trade.
“It’s not that I don’t like seeing things grow, Your Grace,” he’d said once. “It’s that I’ve got no talent for it. Me da’s got the gift. I’ve got the curse. Me da doesn’t want me touching anything for fear I’ll kill it before it has a chance to put down roots.”
The head gardener had verified Jason’s words by looking relieved when Alex informed him that he’d like his son to be his apprentice.
Jason had been with him ever since, appearing in the office when dawn lit the sky and working until Alex dismissed him.
“We’re making a side trip before we go on to Inverness,” he said, entering the room.
Jason glanced up, blinking at him.
“Your Grace?”
“A small personal errand,” he said. “Have you packed the cases?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Jason had copied all the names, occupations, and other details of his subjects onto lists that he was going to take to his Inverness home for safekeeping. The original cards, the ones with the fingerprints, would remain at Blackhall. The lists, which included the dates he’d taken each print, would go a long way to proving that his discovery preceded that fool Simons. The Scottish Society had only to study the matter to agree.
Unfortunately, he’d learned that logic didn’t often lead to the results he wanted. People were unpredictable. Besides, the society had already given him reason to distrust its decisions.
Still, he would try once more. He had a core of iron, a fact they would soon realize. So would the idiot—Lorna Gordon or Marie—who’d left the anonymous note for his mother.
“You going out walking again, Mrs. Gordon?”
Lorna heard the sneering tone in the landlady’s voice and wondered if she talked like that to other people or only to her.
Every time she left her room of late, the woman was standing in the hallway watching her, just as she was now.
Mrs. MacDonald, if she’d been a color, would have been a blackish brown, the same shade as a fouled bog, or the color of marshland roots.
“Yes, Mrs. MacDonald, I am,” she said, buttoning the top button of her cloak.
“To collect your herbs?”
She nodded, pulling on her gloves.
“I don’t want you stinking up my house with those potions of yours.”
“They’re not potions, Mrs. MacDonald. They’re herbal remedies.”
“You have a lot of practice in those, do you?”
“My father was a botanist. I learned everything I know from him.”
The other woman didn’t respond. Instead, she peered down her long nose at Lorna.
Ever since she’d arrived in Wittan Village with her trunk and her story of being a widow, the landlady had watched her with narrowed eyes.
She hadn’t expected her to ask so many questions.
“How did your husband die?” Mrs. MacDonald had asked two months ago.
“A carriage accident,” she told her.
“You’ve no family to take you in?”
“No, my husband and I were both orphans.”
“No cousins?”
“No cousins. No uncles. No aunts. No relatives of any kind.”
That hadn’t been a lie. Neither her mother nor father had large families. She’d been alone in the world and had only duplicated that history for her invented husband.
“I don’t run a charity here, Mrs. Gordon,” the landlady said now.
There was that tone again, when the woman called her Missus. Once more Lorna ignored it.
“Don’t think you and your bairn have a place here without paying.”
“No, Mrs. MacDonald.”
The woman finally stepped aside, but Lorna could feel those cold blue eyes on her as she left the house. She was tired, but it was important that she harvest what she could, regardless of how she felt.
At least she was able to sell her remedies at the market. She’d come up with the idea in those terrible months of worry at Blackhall.
Several of the older women of the village used her comfrey joint balm to ease the arthritis in their hands. The Sunshine Ointment she made, so-called because its ingredients made it bright yellow, was helpful in drawing splinters from the skin and reducing the size of boils.
She blessed her education at her father’s side. Hopefully, she would be able to continue to support herself using what she’d learned.
She often found herself wondering what her father would say about her current circumstances. He would probably have warned her against the excesses of passion, had she been brave or foolish enough to ask him about that. What would he have said about what Nan had done?
A week had passed and no one had come, which meant that the duchess didn’t care if her son had a by-blow in the village. Or maybe the note had gotten lost. Someone could have torn it up before the duchess read it.
She needed to stop worrying and concern herself with the task at hand.
Still, if she’d had the money, she would have moved farther away. Blackhall Castle was too close, and so was the Duke of Kinross.
“Has Alex truly left for Inverness, Louise?”
The Dowager Duchess of Kinross hesitated in pouring her special blend of potpourri into one of the ceramic jars. She finished what she was doing before turning and smiling at Mary Taylor. The effort required to produce that smile was not noticed by the younger woman, but then Mary rarely saw anything beyond her own interests.
“Yes, Alex has left.”
“In this weather? It’s icy and snowing. How could you allow him to do such a thing?”
Louise bit back her impatience with some difficulty, managing to answer in a reasonably calm manner.
“Alex is a grown man, Mary. I do not dictate his movements.”
“Someone should, if he’s going to take such chances. Do you know how many carriage accidents happen in this kind of weather?”
If she didn’t stop the younger woman, she was certain to be lectured with facts, figures, and hideous details. Mary read the newspapers and broadsheets from first page to last and accumulated data about horrors the way other women collected gloves, fans, or love letters. Unfortunately, she also had a good memory, which Louise fervently wished were put to better use.
Mary was Alex’s sister-in-law. The woman had been at Blackhall for five years, ever since Ruth married Alex. As daughters of an impecunious earl, they’d lived in the family home for which Mary claimed a particularly dramatic attachment. Thornhill, however, was practically a ruin, with a destroyed tower and a roof like a sieve. Instead of spending a fortune repairing and restoring it, Alex had simply offered Mary a hom
e here.
Louise had wished, on more than one occasion, that her son had spent the money on the Taylor family home.
Mary had a habit of bursting into her apartments with little provocation in order to make breathless announcements of minor events. Yesterday it was that the majordomo and Mrs. McDermott were at odds about the silver polish. The day before that it had been that Alex hadn’t appeared at breakfast and was he wasting away?
In addition to intruding on her privacy, the young woman sought her out everywhere, such as now in the family parlor. Blackhall possessed seventy-two rooms, and there were only a few places in the castle where she could escape from Mary.
Louise disliked traveling, but when the weather was better she was going to Edinburgh to hide in their home there. She would give out that she was going to Paris or staying with friends, anything but have Mary follow her. Not that she would as long as Alex was in residence at Blackhall.
“When is he going to return?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know. When he does, I imagine.”
“How many days, Louise?”
She really disliked being talked to in such a fashion, but for the sake of accord, she merely turned and went back to the potpourri.
“I don’t know, Mary.”
The woman had not endeared herself to Louise from the moment she’d met her. In that first encounter, Mary had made it known that she knew Louise’s antecedents and, in her opinion, they failed to pass approval. Louise’s grandfather was an earl, the same rank as Mary’s father. Therefore, in Mary’s mind, she was a more noble member of the nobility.
In that first meeting it had been evident that Mary was one of those people who had an opinion on everything and wished to share it with the world. Unfortunately, she never changed her opinion. Incidentals like new facts or information never altered what she believed about anything.
“He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”
“Do you require that he does so?” Louise asked, as pleasantly as she was able.
She occasionally wanted to put her hands on Mary’s shoulders, look deep into her eyes, and tell the young woman that she had failed to grasp the reality of her situation. She was here because of Alex’s generosity. She was not truly family. She had no right to question everything that went on at Blackhall. Or to comment endlessly about it. Unfortunately, giving Mary a stern talking to wouldn’t change anything, least of all Mary’s behavior.
