The MacGregor's Lady

by Burrowes, Grace

  “I don’t hear you lamenting.”

  “Like you, I have a list of behaviors in which I do not indulge. Shall we return you to the inn?”

  She glanced again toward the smithy. The place was nothing special, a typical village blacksmith’s shop, where by the nature of the work, men congregated and passed the time of day while horses were shod or tools were repaired. The forge kept the interior blisteringly hot even on bitter days.

  She’d seen him with his shirt off. It hit him low in the gut that she’d seen not just his ungentlemanly muscles, but also his un-English complexion. His un-Scottish complexion, in fact. She was an intelligent woman; she’d realize he wasn’t suffering from excessive sun on his entire body in March.

  “The inn is comfortable, as you promised us,” she said, “but you haven’t answered my question, Lord Balfour. How long will we tarry? My aunt’s company in close quarters is not easy to bear, though she means well and tries hard.”

  “Playing If-Only and Isn’t-It-a-Shame until you’ve lost your reason?” Aunt Enid and Uncle Fen would have much in common.

  “She tries to be helpful, my lord.”

  Would he be so charitable toward his uncle? “We’ll leave at first light, and the journey from here is easier, because we’re close to the coast where the water moderates the worst of the weather. We’ll hop the train in Berwick and be in Town in no time.”

  She put her hand back on his arm, but lightly, just for show, which along with Miss Cooper’s my-lording, depressed Asher’s mood yet further.

  ***

  “You might as well see the sights while we’re waiting for our wardrobes to be made ready.” Enid paused while winding soft ivory yarn into a ball. “That cat’s stare is the most unnerving thing. I don’t believe I’ve seen an animal with two different colored eyes like that.”

  “Several of them live in Lord Balfour’s stables,” Hannah said as the white cat near the hearth took a bath. The animal boasted one blue eye and one green eye, and both were beautiful, though the whole was disconcerting. “Several in the mews, I mean. Balfour says there’s a mama cat who has one or so per litter.”

  Not Asher, for Hannah was determined to avoid familiarities with the man—further familiarities, rather.

  “Well, why isn’t this one in the mews, then? And how can you have an objection to seeing the Tower, the Menagerie, the churches, and cathedrals? This is your heritage too, you know. Your family isn’t all Colonial savages and backwoodsmen.”

  “I’m aware of my heritage.” Which included a backwoodsman or two, but the only savage Hannah knew was her step-papa. “Why don’t you accompany Lord Balfour, and I’ll remain here?”

  The London town house sported a small library, which boasted more medical treatises and novels than the northern collection had. Hannah looked forward to becoming well acquainted with its offerings, and to neglecting her embroidery shamelessly.

  “For you to remain home will not do, Hannah. The Season starts in only a few weeks, and you won’t have time for sightseeing. Besides, your restlessness is irksome. You will go, and I will stay home, for I feel a megrim coming on and must away to my bed.”

  Aunt was becoming a sot. Even now, a tisane that was more brandy than tea sat at her elbow. “This is your second megrim this week.”

  “It’s the weight of expectation regarding your Season, and all the shopping yet to do.” Aunt put the back of her hand to her forehead, as if feeling for a fever, and Hannah knew she’d just been trounced.

  Though Aunt had a point. Being confined in Balfour’s London town house for the past three days was taking a toll. Even if it meant putting up with his company, Hannah would feel better for getting out of the house and away from her aunt.

  “Miss Enid isn’t coming with us?” Balfour asked when Hannah met him at the foot of the stairs.

  “A megrim stalks her.”

  He picked up the cat that had followed Hannah from the parlor, and the beast began purring and rubbing its cheek against Balfour’s chest. “Have you considered taking all of her patent remedies and nostrums in hand? Somebody should. It’s easy to misjudge when you’re using so many at once, and half of them are more poison than medication.”

  This was a physician trying to masquerade as the polite host, for which Hannah had to respect him.

  “She is to be taking me in hand,” Hannah said as Balfour gently scratched the cat under the chin, “though you have a point. My grandmother warned me on the same issue before we set sail.”

  “The grandmother to whom you’ve written so regularly?”

  Had he no older relatives in whom to confide his troubles, to whom he might turn for consolation and counsel? Hannah stifled an urge to pluck the cat from his arms, the beast was making such a racket.

  “She’s my only paternal relation. What sights are we to see today, that I might write her of those as well?”

  He put the cat down, carefully, not the casual tossing aside a saucy cat might merit from time to time.

  “We’ll start with whatever you please, Hannah Cooper, and I’ll be in your debt, because you’ve given me an excuse to get out of this house.”

  He settled her cloak around her shoulders and began to talk of the various churches and monuments they might visit. The weather was moderating—Balfour said that was in part because they had come almost due south from Scotland—and a weak sun was trying to melt the last of the city’s snow.

  He handed Hannah up into a phaeton, the height giving her a fine view of their surroundings, the brisk air chilling her cheeks between stops. A tiger rode up behind and held the horses while Balfour escorted Hannah from one amazingly ancient house of worship to another.

  He spoke of the coronations held, the kings buried, the foul and wondrous deeds done at each location, until Hannah could almost believe his duties were not an imposition, but rather, his opportunity to boast about England’s capital city. He fell silent when they saw the lions in the menagerie, inspiring Hannah to suggest they repair to a tea shop rather than visit the rest of the caged animals.

  “One feels sorry,” she said when Balfour had placed their order. “One feels sorry for the lions, that is. Were they less magnificent, they’d be free to chase the gazelles all the livelong day. But they are wonderful, and so we must cage them up and make them pathetic.”

  He paused in the arrangement of their outerwear on a hook. “They’re merely beasts. Rather odoriferous beasts, in their current confines.”

  “They are not merely beasts.”

  He settled beside her, much as he’d done in the grog shop in Edinburgh, while Hannah tried to find words to reach him. They were not merely beasts, any more than he was just any old earl. “They are lions, made for swift and merciless pursuit of prey, hot, lazy afternoons sleeping off full bellies, and magnificent lives as lions where God intended lions to thrive. We make them something else entirely when we bring them here, pretending because they don’t die that we’ve provided adequately for them.”

  The quality of his frown changed, his mink-brown brows rising in thought, putting Hannah in mind of otters and how joyously they played in the wild.

  “Are you a lion, then, Miss Cooper, captured and brought to civilization from your natural surrounds, here to be caged and kept alive for the enjoyment of your captors?”

  She studied him for a long moment then studied him further as their tray arrived. Was he a lion? He’d grown noticeably quieter since they’d arrived in the malodorous environs of London.

  “You weren’t like this that night outside Steeth. You’ve misplaced your manners, Lord Balfour.”

  He pushed the cream and sugar at her, letting her fix her cup first then tending to his own. “My manners aren’t what’s gone missing,” he said, stirring his tea.

  Hannah sipped in silence, knowing it was a good, strong cup of tea, served piping hot, with rich cream and generously sugared. And yet it tasted off. Balfour’s ill humor was that powerful.

  His silence spread like
gloom over the table, and Hannah spoke to combat it more than to be polite.

  “You’re right in some ways. I am a Colonial by your standards, and that means I’m closer to the lions. We have them in America, mountain lions with no great ruff, but enormous teeth and claws. When I visited my cousins north of Harrisburg, I heard them. Lions don’t roar in the New World, they scream.”

  He tapped his spoon against his teacup. The porcelain looked tiny in his hand, the teacup absurdly decorated in blue pastel birds and delicate yellow flowers. She plowed on because he said nothing, but stared at his tea.

  “I see the pelts baled up on the wharves. I see the men who spend winters hunting the furs. As a young man, my father was one of those men, and he talked to me of his trapping. He routinely braved conditions like those we faced in Steeth. He went months without hearing another human voice, Lord Balfour. He heard the wolves howling, the lions screaming, the woodpeckers searching for their dinners. He heard the snow melting and the ice cracking as the lakes and ponds thawed. You wouldn’t expect such a man, so full of life and courage, to enjoy being caged up and gawked at like those poor lions, would you?”

  The look he gave her was so piercing, it was as if he didn’t see her physical form, but some other manifestation of her. Her words maybe, or her soul.

  “Your tea will get cold, Miss Cooper.” He set his cup down, having finished the contents in a single swallow.

  “You think I’m daft,” she said, dutifully taking a taste. “I shall certainly go daft if I have to prance around from now until July, pretending I haven’t a thought in my head. What’s in this tea? I like it.”

  “Lavender. I enjoy it for a change from time to time, but we can try a different flavor of tea at each shop.”

  Where had Asher MacGregor gone? For surely, only the platitudinous Lord Balfour had sat down to tea. “So there’s to be more tramping about, cooing at lions?”

  “You didn’t see anything today that you’ll write to your grandmother about?”

  Hannah accorded him points for not coming back with a biting rejoinder. “Oh, I’ll write to her. I’ll tell her you can barely see the sun for all the coal smoke here, and the air stinks of it incessantly, which probably accounts for Aunt’s many megrims. I will tell her they’ve had grand churches here for nigh seven hundred years, and yet the Christian charity is so lacking, people probably froze to death on those church steps this very winter. I’ll tell her the wealth of the British empire has long since been acknowledged as coming from her colonies, and yet those colonies still—even decades after the American example—have no representation in the most civilized government in the world.”

  “Is that all?”

  A lift of his eyebrow and a particular heat in his gaze suggested her verbal rebellion had distracted him from his melancholy, so she forged ahead.

  “Your Prince Consort has made a life’s work of bettering the condition of working men, and yet they despise him for his efforts. Your queen leads her empire but has increasingly little to do with the government thereof. This is an improvement, however, over a king who was mad and a regent who built palaces while his former soldiers starved in the streets. The Americas are better off without you English.”

  “You are a very opinionated lady,” he said, rising. “One might say you’re even rude—though I do not—but you are wrong: I am not English. My title is Scottish, and my patrilineage is exclusively Scottish.”

  This seemed to matter to him, though Hannah was more concerned with the topic under discussion. “I see with my own eyes what’s before me.” She rose as well, and turned her back to him so he might settle her cloak on her shoulders. “I cannot afford to doubt my own eyes, Lord Balfour. I should go mad if I did.”

  She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have given her shoulders a smooth pat—a caress?—as she fastened the frogs at her throat. When she turned sharply to look at him, his expression was as severe as ever.

  How she missed the man she’d eaten roast hare with outside Steeth, the man she’d cuddled with.

  He tossed some coins on the table and held out his arm. “Come, we’ll lose the light, and the streets get icy when darkness falls.”

  Something about their exchange had stifled his running commentary on the wonders of London, and Hannah missed his voice. Missed having at least that much of him attending her.

  “I’m not like a lion,” she said as they approached his phaeton. “I won’t bite everybody who tries to extend me kindness.”

  “Won’t you?”

  Was that humor in his eyes? “You’re the one who was so accommodating when a freezing night loomed, and has become such a pestilential lord now.”

  And then, when he should have handed her up—always a tricky undertaking, and one Balfour monitored closely—he surprised the daylights out of her.

  “I’m sorry for that, for being such a pestilential lord. Perhaps you were a more accommodating guest out on the moor, or more… something.” An apology and a backhanded sort of admission, while he kept Hannah’s hand grasped in his own.

  “I was half-tipsy. I can hardly be expected to observe all the finer points of etiquette with a man who escorts me to the bushes.” With the only man to ever escort her to the bushes.

  “You weren’t going to go alone, and you won’t go alone into the ballrooms, Boston.”

  And with those few words, Hannah again felt the sort of warmth she’d experienced on the wintry moor, a sense of safety and well-being, of resting in good hands.

  “Neither will I let you face those ballrooms alone, Asher MacGregor. You’d get to pacing and flicking your tail, and then whatever would I do for an escort?”

  Hannah clambered up into the carriage as the horse stomped a big back hoof in the mucky slush. Nimble as a cat, Balfour dodged back in time to preserve his boots from the worst of what might have befallen them.

  Six

  “You will see Balfour compromised with the Cooper girl if it’s the last useful thing you do.”

  Despite the conviction in his words, old Fenimore was ill. Malcolm Macallan could smell it on him, the way a child called down from the schoolroom could smell an upcoming beating on the fumes of his father’s breath. “Why would I treat family so shabbily, Uncle?”

  “I am not your uncle, and you will do as I say or the sum advanced to you each quarter will disappear like that.” Fenimore snapped bony, liver-spotted fingers, his signet ring loose above swollen joints.

  Malcolm paced around the study, which was heated to stifling—appropriately enough—and rife with the smell of camphor and decrepitude. He paused before an arrangement of decanters on the sideboard and began lifting the stoppers, sniffing them one by one to chase the scent of decline from his nose. “Your remittance was late last quarter, my lord. Time to get a solicitor whose education started before the turn of the century.”

  They were cousins at two removes, but for all the affection between them, it might have been twenty.

  “Perhaps the remittance was late because you’ve been tarrying on English soil too long. The likes of you belong in the sewers of Paris. In my day, your kind were hung by the neck as a public spectacle.”

  Where Malcolm belonged was Greece, Denmark, or somewhere a fellow wasn’t defined solely by the nature of the orifices he’d penetrated with his erect cock as a schoolboy.

  “I like Asher. What has he done to deserve marriage to a Colonial who likely squints and trots around with a pet squirrel on her shoulder?”

  The old man had to work to suppress a smile at that description. “He has deserted his responsibility for years on end, left his family to weather the results of the famine without his title to aid them, allowed his only niece to be all but snatched into the hands of the Marquess of Quinworth, and reduced his brother Ian to assuming the title and taking in paying guests—for the love of God—before Ian would apply for funds from the earldom’s trusts.”

  Malcolm chose a gentle whiskey, one aged in barrels that hadn’t been very
heavily treated with peat smoke, or perhaps not peated at all. Even in their distilling, the MacGregors took odd starts as often as hares on the heath changed direction.

  “You’re saying Asher has been independent and proud. Terrible shortcomings in a Scottish laird.” Malcolm saluted Fenimore with his drink to add a further dash of sand in the old man’s gears.

  “He’s neglected every one of his duties, and by God, he will not neglect them any longer. The American will understand a heathen like Balfour. She’ll put up with his uncouth manners and bring a sizable dowry to the bargain. She’s used goods, and a title, even a Scottish title, is far more than she ought to expect. The two of them deserve each other.”

  Trust the old man to know everybody’s business, even as he was being measured for his shroud, and trust him too, to judge all in his ambit and pass sentence on them as well.

  Malcolm wanted no part of Fenimore’s game, and yet… a man had to eat. Even frittering his life away in Paris, a man had to eat, and so did his dependents.

  “If I’m to do the pretty on the London social stage this spring, I will need a house, a wardrobe, a coach-and-pair as well as a riding horse. I might very well have to pursue the lovebirds to the house parties and perhaps even into the fall Season. The paltry sum you send to ensure I remain at a safe distance from home is not adequate for the scheme you set me to now, Fenimore.”

  The baron twitched the afghan over his knees—the MacGregor plaid, though the MacGregors wanted no part of him—licked old, colorless lips, and stared at the fire. “You are unnatural in so many ways.”

  The accusation hardly qualified as an insult, except for the quiet despair with which Fenimore spoke. Malcolm took a sip of lovely libation and struggled against something close to pity—guilt, perhaps? Not for seizing an advantage with the old man, but for taking advantage of Asher MacGregor’s bad fortune.