The gardens were beautiful by moonlight, peaceful and silvery like a faery world.
“Good evening, Miss Augusta.” The large shadow with the low, pleasant voice detached itself from a bench along the wall.
“My lord.”
“Ian,” he said, coming closer. “As we are quite alone. I suppose you could not sleep?”
“I could not, which is silly. My usual ability to rest at any opportunity seems to have gone missing.” She was also missing her slippers, which was beyond silly. He sauntered up to her, his features arranged into a frown as he studied her by the moonlight.
“You miss your cat. Sit with me and tell me about him.” He clasped her wrist in a warm grip and led her back to his bench. This relieved Augusta of the need to demur and fuss and retreat to the solitude of her room, when she really had no interest in such a course.
None at all, and neither did that appall her at all when well it should have.
“He was your guardian cat, was he not?” The earl waited until Augusta took a seat, then came down beside her.
“He was a fat, lazy house cat, but he was mine.”
“He kept your feet warm.”
Augusta’s gaze traveled down to her bare toes. She looked over and saw in the earl’s expression that he’d also taken in her barefoot state—again. Well, let him be shocked, though he didn’t strike her as a man much given to the vapors.
“He kept my heart warm.”
She felt the man beside her measuring those words. Were it broad daylight, were it one of their quiet conversations at the breakfast table, she could not have uttered that truth to him. Out here, in the cool and sweet night air, she didn’t think to keep it to herself.
“Your aunt is throwing herself at my baby brother.”
And he probably would not have said those words to her by day either. “I know. Is this a problem?”
“It means Miss Genie’s chaperone is distracted. That could be a problem.”
“Or a suitor’s opportunity.”
“I suppose it might mean that too.”
He fell silent while Augusta lectured herself on family duty and tried to forget three—no, four—innocuous kisses.
“I’m concerned that Genie is so disenchanted with the idea of marriage she’s willing to risk her reputation to avoid it.” That should be plain enough.
“She’s going to drag one of my stable lads off into the trees? They’ll go willingly, most of them.”
“Not one of your stable lads.” She counted on his canny intelligence to provide the details. A flirtation with a stable boy could be hushed up; an affair with the earl’s heir could not.
“Bloody damn.” He sat forward much as Hester had done earlier, but on him, the posture showed his shoulders to wonderful advantage. He was in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his cuffs turned back halfway up his forearms. “Please forgive my language. Is your family given to drama generally?”
“No more than yours, probably. I don’t find it appealing to observe these goings on, my lord. I love my family, yet I hardly know how to assist them when they’re taking such peculiar notions.”
She hadn’t meant to my lord him. He glanced at her in the moonlight, a simmering, considering glance that made Augusta’s hand twitch with the desire to smooth her palm over his shoulders. They bore the weight of all the family concerns, those shoulders.
And they bore that weight alone. She shifted a little closer to him under the guise of tucking one foot under her seat. He made no move to scoot away, which meant Augusta could feel the warmth of his body heat.
“Can you speak to your aunt?”
“About?”
Another glance, this one tinged with humor.
“That’s the difficult part, isn’t it? How do you tell a grown man or a grown woman to mind their duties and stop carrying on like a milkmaid and her shepherd boy?”
“Julia’s husband was much older than she, and I gather her marriage was merely cordial. I’m sure she feels…” How to describe the feelings that could drive a decent lady to risk her reputation for a little passion with a Scotsman?
“She feels what, Miss Augusta?”
“Like me.” Augusta got up, gathering the blanket around her shoulders and taking three steps out into the moonlight. “I sometimes feel like a wild creature with a broken wing, taken captive for the purpose of healing, but now my bones are knitted and the door to my cage is cracked open and I…”
He rose. She could feel him standing behind her. “Tell me, Augusta.”
“I can’t step through,” she said. “I forget how to step through into freedom, though I have the certain conviction that I must.”
The ideas were forming in her head even as she spoke, and they rang true. They rang so, so true. “Julia might feel like that. A little desperate and more confused than she can say.”
“While I feel as if my freedom is slipping from me, day by day. I don’t know how to stop it, but I have the certain conviction that I must.”
His hand, big and warm, descended to her shoulder and gave a slow squeeze. He’d spoken quietly. Augusta feared very much he’d spoken from the heart. She covered his hand where it rested on her shoulder, hoping—perhaps as he had—that a simple touch would say what words could not. When he stepped away, she was torn between relief and disappointment.
She turned to face him. “What would you have me do with respect to Julia? Hester noticed her lapse, and that will be a significant reproach in itself.”
“I don’t ask that you do anything,” he said, his lips quirking. “Con and Julia are adults, and provided they use discretion, I expect them to work out their own dealings. What I ask of you is that you keep the requisite close eye on Genie. I would not have my prospective bride err when adequate supervision would spare her the misstep.”
“She will not misstep, my lord.” And this time, Augusta used the honorific intentionally.
“Then it falls to me to assure her our marriage will be congenial and comfortable for her, which assurances I can honestly give. It’s late, my dear. Should we be going in?”
She nodded but made one more push at the door of her cage.
“It should be congenial and comfortable for you too, Ian.” She wanted him to know this, that she thought him worthy and deserving of happiness.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your marriage. It should be congenial and comfortable for you as well.”
“Intriguing notion.” He winged his arm at her, and Augusta realized she was being gently dismissed. “And here I thought the main priority was that my marriage be lucrative for me and socially advantageous for her.”
She let him escort her back to her terrace doors, the bleakness in his tone leaving her heart aching for him.
Mostly for him.
***
On the balcony adjoining his second-story suite, Willard Daniels, Baron of Altsax, blew out a silent puff of smoke from his cheroot.
Women were idiots. That little tableau on the terrace below confirmed this universal truth. Children generally took some direction from a stout caning or a well-delivered slap. Nonetheless, girl children could be relied upon to grow into incorrigible stupidity.
Julia trying to take a reluctant Scotsman for a lover was only to be expected. The better her breeding, the more a decent woman longed for the mud. And an impoverished younger Scottish son definitely qualified as mud, particularly when he sported the hulking dimensions of Connor MacGregor and generally savored of the stables. A peasant in plaid, and she was welcome to him.
Genie and this fool notion of getting herself ruined was a different matter altogether. The girl had her mother’s complete lack of sense. If Genie was willing to be ruined to avoid marriage, then her dread of the weddin
g night couldn’t possibly be what put her off the idea of matrimony generally.
She was just being contrary, and a word in certain ears ought to see that contrariness brought to an end.
And then there was dear Augusta, an antidote with a hidden stubborn streak, whose blasted cat had saved her life by sacrificing its own. Guardian cat, indeed.
The baron hadn’t been able to see the earl and the antidote as they conversed below him. Moon shadows and the plants intended to make the balcony private had obscured them.
But he’d heard them. Heard Balfour call a dried-up spinster by her given name, heard the quality of the silences between them, heard Augusta’s pathetic little confidences and the earl’s reciprocal confession.
The earl sported a title and was decent looking in the way a plough horse could be a handsome specimen of brute ability. Such a man was going to dally and flirt and take his pleasures where he found them.
But when the baron’s plans for Augusta bore fruit, the earl wouldn’t be finding those pleasures with her.
***
Augusta draped her ugly shawl around her shoulders and tried to convince herself this early morning constitutional had nothing to do with an unbecoming desire to spend time with a certain handsome, charming earl.
An earl whose voice in the darkness promised secrets and pleasures, for all he’d been a perfect if startlingly honest gentleman.
The pleasure of a simple touch, for one.
The pleasure of a confidence shared and a confidence received.
The soul-deep pleasure of, for a few moon-gilded minutes, not feeling so desolately alone in this life.
As she churned along past the gardens, Augusta tried to tell herself to put away these fancies, but the lovely Scottish morning, the scent of the flowers, and quite possibly her own dormant stubborn streak, combined to chase off her better intentions.
He had touched her. He had spoken with her. He had behaved with complete propriety and still been able to give her a sense of… A word bloomed in her awareness. A word spinsters had no occasion to use, a word that warmed her heart and put a wide, purely female smile on her face.
They had shared a sense of intimacy. A good intimacy, with elements of trust and consideration about it, not the pawing, undignified liberties Henry Post-Williams had inflicted on her.
She was savoring this insight as she gained the trees, and savoring it yet still as she turned onto the path she’d taken yesterday with Gil.
Intimacy, closeness, warmth—physical warmth, yes, but a warmth of the heart as well. Just describing those few minutes with the earl was buoying her somehow. Opening the door of her cage, the windows of the cell she’d occupied since her parents’ deaths.
Augusta raised her gaze to the beauty of the forest around her only to come to an abrupt halt when the elf in the tree started clambering down limb by limb.
Six
“I won’t tell on ye if ye won’t tell on me.”
The burr was so thick Augusta could barely make out the words. “I beg your pardon?”
“We won’t tattle, right? Ma would skelp m’ bum something fierce.”
Augusta caught the sense of that, and realized the girl—not an elf, despite fat red braids, a smattering of freckles on a perfect complexion, and a pixie grin—was looking for a conspirator.
“If we walk back to the house together, we will neither of us be seen out alone. Perhaps you were concerned I’d get lost in the woods?”
“Ach, you canna get lost in this wee park.” The child took Augusta’s hand and started back in the direction of the house. “But ye’d best nae be late t’ table.”
“Your ma will skelp m’ bum?”
The child grinned more widely, swinging Augusta’s hand as they moved along. “You’re a grand lady and a guest of the house. Ma says we must show you courtesy because you’re a guest and because your English coin keeps the doddies in their fodder. I love the doddies. I love all the animals.”
“Doddy?”
“Fine beef, the Angus. We have red and black both, but mostly black. Sun is kinder to dark coats in winter. Uncle has a fold of the Highland cattle as well.” She chattered on, about her favorite calf, and Uncle Con let her pick out a pair of heifers to start her own herd, and cows were better than sheep because the sheep forced the crofters out after the ’45. The child wove a tale of agronomy and English aggression that Augusta suspected was mostly true.
“I’m Augusta,” she interjected when they approached the back terrace. “Who are you?”
“I’m Fiona of Clan MacGregor, daughter of the Lady Mary Fran and that good-looking, poaching Sassenach bastard Gordie Flynn, or that’s what my uncs call my da. Ma says he wasn’t so bad for an Englishman. Everybody poaches, or they used to.”
“I am pleased to meet you Fiona of Clan MacGregor. Can we go walking again sometime soon?”
“Really? You want to walk with me?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It might seem to you like no one could get lost in those woods, but I’m not from around here, and I need a guide if I’m not to be late to breakfast. Your escort was very helpful.”
The child dropped Augusta’s hand and pushed a toe through the pebbles on the garden path. “No, it wasn’t. I’m a pest. Even Uncle Ian sometimes has to tell me to go visit the ponies. Ma says I’m always underfoot, and Uncle Con says I should have been a boy.”
“Who would want to be a boy?” Augusta gave a mock shudder. “They spit and never wash behind their ears and burp and all manner of indelicate things.”
Fiona’s grin disappeared. “My uncs don’t spit.”
“They are gentlemen, but we are ladies. We know how to make cream cakes and knit lovely blankets and how to give the animals all the best names.”
“Yes!” The child spun around with glee, making the gravel crunch beneath her half boot. “Yes! I have to name my cows, and they each had a wee baby, and Uncle Gil never thought up names for any of them. Can I show you my cows?”
Canna shew ye m’ coos?
Augusta had caught the rhythm of the child’s speech and, more significantly, her enthusiasm for the naming task.
“We’ll visit them tomorrow, weather permitting. Naming is important, so you must think about it between then and now. We might take the entire week to find names for all the cows in your herd.”
“Fiona Ursula MacGregor.” The tones were mother-stern, draining the joy from the child’s countenance.
“Good morning, Ma.”
Lady Mary Fran advanced across the terrace, her expression forbidding. “Into the kitchen. You know you’re not to be bothering guests.”
“Yes, Ma.” The girl’s shoulders slumped as she crossed the terrace without another word.
“Please don’t blame Fiona,” Augusta said when the little figure had disappeared into the house. “She didn’t want me to get lost in the woods.”
Mary Fran’s brows knit. “I almost believe you. She’s that tenderhearted, she’d even worry about an Englishwoman.”
“We had a wonderful talk about her cows and the sheep and all manner of things having to do with Balfour.”
Mary Fran’s expression shifted, from guarded to a little bewildered. “I can’t keep a close eye on her, not when we’re entertaining, and the days are so long, and she’s so… she’s quick, haring all over.” She fell silent, her mouth flattening. “You don’t have children.”
“To my sorrow.” Augusta slipped her arm through Mary Fran’s and started toward the house. “If I did have a child, I’d want her to be exactly like Fiona. She reminds me of myself.”
“You?”
Such incredulity, and not the least ill intended.
“I was raised on a large estate, expecting to inherit that property or at least t
o manage one like it. My mother did not enjoy good health, so it was probably apparent I was going to be an only child. My father took this in stride—he wasn’t burdened by a title—and treated me as his heir, if not his son. I wandered my summers away much as Fiona seems to. I knew all the gardeners and shepherds, the gamekeepers, the woodsmen, the dairymen, the tenants, the beekeeper, the stable boys, groundsmen, the goose girl, and the milkmaids—everybody, and they knew me. Papa took me with him when he rode out, first up before him on his horse, then on a leading line on my own pony. It was a wonderful childhood.”
A happy childhood, one Augusta hadn’t thought about for years.
Mary Fran walked along with her in silence for a few moments then paused.
“Her uncles spoil her. I worry about that. They can’t spoil me, so they spoil her instead.”
“And you spoil them.”
Mary Fran’s smile broke over her face like the sun stealing out from behind a cloud. “Yes. Yes, I do. Every chance I get. And if we don’t get into the house soon, we’ll miss breakfast.”
“You most assuredly will, if you haven’t already.”
They both looked up at that masculine voice to see the Earl of Balfour lounging in the door to the back hallway of the house, looking splendid in his kilt and morning attire. “And we can’t have that.” He stepped away to allow the ladies to pass before him inside, then accompanied them into the breakfast parlor.
Augusta chose to sit beside Mary Fran rather than take a place near the earl. He was cordial, of course, holding her chair and offering to fill her plate at the sideboard, but Augusta put him off with a few polite words.
He was going to wed Genie. Once again reminding herself of this truth should have brought Augusta a sense of satisfaction at her cousin’s good fortune.
It really should have.
***
“You need to goddamned woo your infernal bride, Brother.” Gil yanked Ian by the arm along the corridor as he spoke.
“I am wooing her.” Or Ian would be if she’d venture out of her room for more than the space of a meal. Her turned ankle had been healing for three days, and still she hid.
The Bridegroom Wore Plaid Page 9
