“No. I daresay not even His Grace, Lord Malcolm, likes it. It must be very difficult for him to be in such a position.” Though Greer had trouble imagining the pressure—or the mismanagement—that would force him to let so many go. She would speak to her mother immediately to see if there was something they might do to employ at least some of the people at Dalshee.
“I’m sure I don’t know, mileddy.” Mrs. Peddie drew herself together, as if she knew it was her duty to defend Crieff—whomever the embodiment of Crieff might be—from any suggestion of shoddiness. But her better instinct won out. “I do beg yer pardon, mileddy, but as ye were tae be our mistress, and as they say…. Weel, it’s all so devilish confounding. We ne’er had a moment o’ worry about things under Laird Ewan. And they said His Grace, Laird Ewan, were out carousing in Edinburgh, and ne’er came back. But that don’t sound like our laird tae me.”
A sharp pang of Greer’s original alarm cut through the aching fist of grief gripping her. “Nor to me, Mrs. Peddie,” Greer agreed.
She had never thought there had been anything hazy or carousing about the man with whom she had corresponded for ten years. Nothing slipshod or unclear. Make haste slowly, he had always said. Everything she had read spoke of a thoughtful, methodical man. Her thoughtful, methodical, lovely man. With whom she would now never make haste slowly.
The tight heat in her throat was abominable.
“And I can’t like this havey-cavey burial before a single prayer has e’en been said o’er the poor mon’s body,” Mrs. Peddie sniffed.
“Oh, no.” Dread crept under Greer’s doubt, and settled cold in her chest. “But surely the service will be said this morning, Mrs. Peddie, and the burial after, so there’s no fear of that.”
“Weel, my leddy.” Mrs. Peddie managed to look both uncomfortable to be giving Greer such news and outraged on her own behalf. “Ye asked tae see the coffin, but it’s impossible—it’s no’ in the keep. But there’s a fresh mound o’ earth in the family plot up the braeside.” Mrs. Peddie’s indignation spilled over her professional reticence. “I don’t know ’oo else it’d be, but our Laird Ewan. And they’ve not let us put out so much as a vase of mourning flowers, nor have the coffin out in state in the great hall, the way they ought.”
Something hotter and more biting than dread began to burn its way through Greer’s chest—indignation and outrage that things were not being done as they ought. As Ewan was owed. “And who is ‘they’ exactly, Mrs. Peddie? Who made such a decision?”
“I had it frae Mr. MacIntosh, mileddy. Don’t know as ’oo told ’im, but I suspect it were that Mr. Gow, as is His New Grace’s secretary. Erasing all trace of him, our Laird Ewan—e’en the portrait that he had made fae ye in Paris, our Laird said, and hung there”—she gestured to an empty space along the wall—“fae ye, they’ve taken away.”
Oh, the portrait! The pang of this unexpected loss was so sharp and piercing she struggled for breath.
It must have been the full-sized portrait by the famous favorite of the queen that matched the miniature in her pocket. He had posed for it, for her. He had hung it here, for her. It seemed almost obscene that the opportunity to see it at last should be taken from her now.
For the first time in a fortnight her heart filled with something other than aching sorrow—anger, hot and bitter, surged into her blood, and Greer had to fight to work her slow but prodigious temper back under control.
The new Duke of Crieff’s reasons must be his own, but she did not have to like them. She refused to understand them—he had robbed her of her fitting goodbye. He had robbed her of the opportunity to see her beloved’s mortal body, and say her final, private goodbyes. He had stolen the moment when she should have been able to put the handful of earth she had dug with her own hands from the rocky soil atop Glas Maol into Ewan’s grave.
Malcolm Cameron’s actions had hurt her in every way imaginable—the pain gripped her throat and ate away her confidence. What was she to do? What ought she do that would hurt him as much as he had hurt her but would not hurt Crieff—Lord forbid she should cause Mrs. Peddie, or anyone else on the staff, any more grief.
She had to do what was best for them, not suit her own selfish needs. “I’m sure it will all be fine in the end, Mrs. Peddie. Our prayers will not go amiss, no matter the order they are said in.”
“I suppose sae, mileddy,” the housekeeper sniffed. “I hope sae.”
“I know so, Mrs. Peddie. Because we will make it so,” she assured the woman. “I thank you for both your frankness and your kindness, Mrs. Peddie. You’ve given me much to think about.”
She wanted to be alone with Ewan—alone with the portrait she had sighed over in miniature. She wanted to appreciate the greater detail of the larger portrait—the warmth of the clear green eyes, the relaxed smile that showed itself only in the turned-up corner of his mouth. And more than anything else, the calm certainty with which the young man in the miniature gazed out at the world.
But he, and his portrait were already gone—erased from the world before she could see or learn anything more of him. Gone before she ever had a chance to love him.
Lady Greer Douglas
Dalshee House
Perthshire, Scotland
2 March, 1788
Dear Lady G,
I write in the hope that this finds you well, in good health and spirits. I read your last with a heart not as full of longing as I might have thought, for I—and my Scots companions in study—have been declared nearly polished after this trip to the Low Countries, and ready to be sent back to Scotland by the end of Easter Term. Already the air smells sweeter! For once, I am ready to make haste more quickly!
However, I must warn you that my trustees, who, along with my grandfather, have all the say in such things, declare that I needs must be sent to St. Andrews—for I would not countenance either Oxford, Cambridge, nor even Edinburgh, which are all too far from home—for university learning. There I hope to study something more to the point in managing Crieff, and advising you in stewarding Dalshee, in agronomy and agricultural management.
Yet, theory is no substitute for experience, and I wish with all my heart that I were coming home to stay and perhaps, with your permission, kiss you in person.
Your devoted friend, E
Lord Ewan Cameron
Rapenburg 94
Leiden, Netherlands
20 April, 1788
Dear Ewan,
How exciting for you to study at university in the fall! I am once again all jealousy for your coming time in St. Andrews. I can see you already with your long academic gowns flapping at your heels as you run down ancient porticoes and across green quadrangles. Just the words make me dizzy with delight.
But lest you think I am too dizzy for deep thought, Dear Hally and I are making a course of study to learn all that I can of current best practices of the three-field rotation of crops, to which I am also adding a thorough study of chemistry, so as to properly understand the makeup of the soil at Crieff. Also, what is the underpinning geology of Crieff? We here are on granite, so I supposed you were too, but I should hate to get it wrong if you were on limestone, or heaven forfend, chalk. Pl. enlighten me soonest.
Hoping you passed the feast of Easter in all comfort, so you might come home to Perthshire as soon as may be. And do please bring your kisses with you! I am waiting in happy anticipation of being,
Yours, G
Chapter 14
Greer thought it best to prepare her parents. “His Grace has done the most unimaginably horrid thing,” she warned when they joined her in her sitting room before going down to the service. “I’m afraid they’ve buried Ewan already.”
Mama put a hand to her throat, but kept her comment to a civil, “How irregular. Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand?”
“I have not misunderstood—I had it from Mrs. Peddie herself. And I can see with my own eyes that the grave is closed.” She gestured out the window to the fresh heap of soil atop the grav
e on the otherwise green braeside.
“Hellfire,” was her Papa’s less measured response. “That’s…blasphemous.”
“Indeed.” Papa’s indignant anger somehow made it easier to control her own. “And now the whole of Crieff, as well as us, is denied their proper goodbyes. Poor Mrs. Peddie was beside herself with the unholy impropriety of it all, and I feel as if I ought to have done…something to prevent it.”
“What could you have done?” Even Mama became adamant. “You are not mistress here. It is not your duty to assist or correct His Grace. There are no shortage of people at Crieff to whom he might have turned for guidance, I’m sure. The priest, or the steward, for instance.”
“But as Ewan’s betrothed, do you think I ought to have helped? I might have easily prevented this miscarriage of ...” What was it—lack of knowledge? Or lack of respect?
“Common decency and common sense ought to have prevented it.” Mama contained her censure to a sigh. “And the priest, surely, ought to have prevented it. But what’s done is done—I don’t suppose they can un-bury him.”
“No.” Greer unclenched her hands from her skirts and took a deep breath to counter the ache in her chest. What could not be avoided, must be faced with all available equanimity. “Best get on with it.”
They did so, making their mournful way across the grounds from the Castle to the ancient kirk of St. Bride, set apart on the grounds where the old village of Crieff had once stood before some industrious Cameron ancestor had moved it two miles down the glen to its present location.
“My Lady Greer.” Malcolm Cameron greeted her at the door to the kirk with both obvious pleasure and apparent relief. “I am glad you have come to condole with me.” He bowed over her hand with more warmth than mere correctness would otherwise dictate, before turning to her parents. “And my Lord and Lady Shee, my thanks.”
Mama pursed her lips to keep herself from saying anything unkind, but Papa gave a pointed look at the plot up the brae and said, “Highly irregular. Badly done, Your Grace.”
Greer, too, chose not to be charmed by Malcolm Cameron—she had come for Ewan’s sake, not his. And though she might have blamed herself for the lapse of protocol—if such a glaring fault could even be called that—which had resulted in burying Ewan’s body before the service, she was not in any mood to forgive Malcolm Cameron’s lapse of common decency for allowing the mistake in the first place.
She assessed him carefully, as if she might see his reasoning writ large across his face. He might be a handsome man by every measure of the world—tall, well-formed, and pleasing to the eye in his well-tailored, fashionably under-dressed dark coat and Hessian boots. Exactly as he should be, she supposed.
Yet she had never been inclined to like a person less—not only was he not Ewan, but he had robbed her of a fitting and final goodbye. And for that, she could never forgive him.
Yet Cameron was oblivious of her disapproval, smiling at her in that contented manner as if he had no thought of having done anything wrong. When she refused to return his smile, he patted his hands against his sides, as if he were searching himself for small talk, and hoped to find a few handy words stashed in his pockets. “You look well.”
This, of course, was a monstrous falsehood. She had a mirror, and knew she looked like nothing less than a stewed beet. She felt hollowed out—the tears and sadness that came with realizing the full extent of her loss had left reddened rims and dark circles below her eyes.
Yet, if she could not be anything more than polite, she must still be civil—her sense of what was due the occasion demanded it. “Your Grace. I hope it will give us all some small measure of peace to lay my beloved betrothed to rest.”
He nodded in solemn agreement. “Yes, quite.” And then he offered his arm. “Shall we go in?”
“Where are the rest of the mourners?” There was only Cameron himself, Greer and her parents, and the priest. Where were Ewan’s friends? Where were the staff and retainers, and the villagers who owed their livelihoods to Crieff? And where were the landowners from other neighboring estates? In his letters, Ewan had written that both the kirk and the lane that led toward the village had been crowded with mourners when the old duke, Ewan’s grandfather, had passed away. “Are the villagers and staff not to pay their respects?”
“I did not like to invite anyone who was not family.” His answer was firm—almost as if it were well thought out in advance. “Knowing my cousin’s reputation, I had not thought there would be anyone else.”
“His reputation?” Greer struggled to keep her voice down, but she could not keep her astonishment and anger from her tone. Nor did she want too—first he was doing it too brown with his compliments, and now he was doing it too black with his disparagement.
Cameron straightened his shoulders and looked away, though two spots of color showed themselves high on his cheekbones. “Unlike my late cousin, I prefer to be a private man, Lady Greer. I cannot change the past, so I prefer to bury it quietly with my cousin. This is a family matter, and it were best for Crieff and the future for this to be a private service to put such a man to quiet, private rest.” He bowed correctly but stiffly and gestured into the kirk. “If you would.”
She was burning with a fury that made it impossible to see straight, let alone put one foot in front of the other. She refused to entertain this version of Ewan his cousin put forth. She knew Ewan. She knew that four hundred and twenty-six letters over the course of ten years could not be lies. She knew that Malcolm Cameron could not know Ewan better than she herself did.
That Ewan was a “private man” had been her surest belief. He had been quiet, and modest, but more particularly, she had been sure that he had been esteemed as a man acutely aware of his public responsibilities and the honor that he owed Crieff. How could such a man have a reputation? How could he not be admired or esteemed?
This recasting Ewan as a profligate was not just disrespectful. Not just a case of not knowing how to manage things correctly. It was something more. Something more personal and vindictive—an attack on his very character.
Ewan may have no longer been able to defend himself, but she certainly would. “No matter your personal feelings, sir, your cousin deserved better from you. Crieff deserved better. When you diminish Crieff, you diminish yourself.”
That sharp piece of her mind delivered, Greer turned her back, but continued to punish him by waiting very correctly for her parents to precede her—she was not above showing Malcolm Cameron how things ought to be done by example. But once she had given way to the heated impulse of the moment, Greer was sorry she had done so—Ewan’s funeral was not the place for a show of childish pettiness.
It was all so…infuriating and demoralizing and wrong.
And achingly sad—anger was no antidote to the fist of grief that grabbed hold of her at the sight of the bare altar. A plain altar cloth covered the ancient stone table, making the lack of the coffin, which ought to have been present and covered by the ancient family standard—that even now flew high atop the castle, and not at half-mast as it should have been—all the more glaringly absent.
The service itself did nothing to alleviate that sadness—the rite was regrettably short and lacking a eulogy, or any actual mention of Ewan and the remarkable person he had been.
It was all so grievously wrong—surely the rector of St. Bride’s had known Ewan well enough to make some kind of personal remark upon his character, or praise his work upon the behalf of Crieff’s people? Why did they not at the very least say how much he had loved Crieff? How thankful he had been for Crieff’s people, who had buoyed and steadied him through his grandfather’s death, and eased his first days as duke?
Instead, the rector only read the lesson from Revelations, and the blessing, “Look, we beseech thee, with compassion upon those who are now in sorrow and affliction; comfort them, O Lord, with thy gracious consolations; make them to know that all things work together for good to them that love thee.”
Her
sorrow and affliction were physical weights that crushed the last of her hope out of her. Ewan seemed already gone and forgotten—erased, even. Indeed, that his body had already been consigned to the plot up the brae was confirmation of that fact.
There was at least a final blessing at the gravesite, but the procession up the hill relieved her feelings no better than the service in the bare kirk. The heap of raw earth looked obscene, a scar upon the hillside, a glaring anomaly against the soft green and gray of the hills. It was an affront to all her feelings—the climbing rose she had brought from Dalshee’s glass house had not been planted.
She wanted something more, some sign of reverence and respect—some reminder that even if Ewan might have been flawed or made mistakes, her betrothed had been part of this life. He had been part of her life. He had been deeply loved and had at least tried to be worthy of Crieff.
She needed some reassurance that her love had not been wasted.
But there was none. With every moment, every solemnly intoned piety, the end came nearer, and Ewan slipped farther and farther away. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Greer had to shut her eyes against the hot rush of hopeless tears as she whispered her goodbyes. “Fate gave the word, the arrow sped, and pierc’d my darling’s heart; And with him all the joys are fled, life can to me impart.” She swallowed over the tight pain. Oh, how Ewan had loved Burns’ poetry. “I love it, too,” she told him. “I loved you, too, truly. I will miss you always.”
And yet when she was finally ready to raise her gaze, she did find one source of solace—there, apart from their little ‘private’ group, was another group led by MacIntosh and Mrs. Peddie. In fact, the entire household of the castle—what remained of them, anyway—as well as a number of outside workers, including the moorkeeper Dewar, stood at solemn attention in the shade of the fir trees.
MAD, BAD & DANGEROUS TO MARRY (The Highland Brides Book 4) Page 12