Greer set herself to convince him. “You’re titled—‘his lordship’ the ostler called you. And the horse you were riding? I know that horse—Cat Sì—”
“Cat Sìth. Aye.” Perhaps there was something to what she was saying—a man would have to have some wealth to afford such a magnificent beast. But still, there was a fair distance between having enough money for a horse and being a duke.
“And if the horse came riderless to the Inn at the Bridge of Shee, then you were on your way home, from Edinburgh, most likely, for the wedding.”
“I’m not married.” The words came unbidden, before he could think them out.
“Oh, aye.” But she was taken aback by his vehemence—she clutched the mare’s rein tight, as if to keep herself from falling. “But…can you not remember?” she asked quietly.
He could not. But he shook his head as if he could will the truth into his brain. “A man would remember something like that. Someone so important.” And a man certainly didn’t like to admit such a gaping hole in his memory to the lass he had been kissing—and dreaming of doing more than just kissing. Dreaming of being with.
“You don’t—” She took another careful, almost pained breath. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Nay.” His voice sounded bitter—hell, he was bitter. He was trapped in a damned limbo by the holes in his memory, stuck between future and past with no sure way forward except back. “I should have listened to Dewar. I should have stayed put and waited for it all to come back.”
She looked at him with a sort of dawning horror, as if she could not believe him.
And he felt all her horror, all the damn diminishment. He felt inadequate to the moment. And to her. “I don’t think I can be who you want me to be.”
“Dear Lord, Ewan.” Her voice caught as if each word was a punishment to her—tears began to fall unchecked across her cheeks. “If I’m right, you have no bloody choice.”
Lord Ewan Cameron
St. Salvador’s College
St. Andrew’s, Fife
18 March, 1790
Dear Ewan,
Gracious, so formal. So disinterested. Well then.
I am gratified to learn that your studies go well in St. Andrews and are so very much concerned with Crieff. Very well.
As to the Cocksfoot ~ Papa and I are are both members of the Dishley Society, and receive the latest information of the Society on all manner of husbandry and agricultural improvements. We have made some success, Papa and I, with the Cocksfoot, although my concern has long been for the peaty make up of a great deal of Dalshee’s bottom land pasturage, where the Swiss variant of seed fares better.
We have, however, been significantly more successful with breeding long-wooled style, hearty sheep of our own, better adapted to forage on the upland heather than other, more celebrated southern breeds, whom we find too fine for our moorland living. Pray do keep us informed of your progress in the theoretical study of these matters. We are happy to compare our results with the latest theories.
But I, for one, liked your letters better when they were full of passionate kisses and not bloody Cocksfoot.
Regards, G
Chapter 18
Everything Greer had prayed for, every whispered bargain with God, every plea in the dark of the night had been answered—Ewan was alive.
And yet somehow, everything was still wrong.
Ewan was alive and in front of her, but shared none of her joy at the revelation, and none of her recognition—he did not know her. He did not even know himself enough to believe her.
Disappointment, guilt and sorrow converged into a pain that squeezed the blood from her heart. And not three hours ago she had blithely dismissed the possibility of heartbreak. How wrong she had been.
Dewar had been right—she should not have brought Ewan out of the glen. She should have left him safe and sound in the bothy. If the ostler—who was not even from Crieff—had recognized Ewan, so too would others. Rumor spread like stink—insidiously—and word would inevitably get back to his murderers, no matter if they were here in the Highlands or in Edinburgh.
“We need to get you to a safe haven.” She would correct her mistake by taking him home to Dalshee, where he could take his time and recover in peace without the possibility of discovery, and where she could shield him from anyone who might wish him harm.
“Aye.” He nodded grimly. “I can’t like the feel of this place.” He looked impatiently down the lane where a sharp-eyed woman leaned over her gate, eyeing them openly. “Come, let me toss you up.”
She let him give her a leg up into the saddle. “I’ll take you home with me, to Dalshee,” she suggested. Greer was sure her parents would not object—in fact, she was sure they would do everything in their considerable power to help him. To help them. “We’ll keep you safe there.”
She knew in an instant that she had said the wrong thing—his face closed off, as if a cloud had passed in front of him, and his hand raked through his cropped hair in a gesture of agitated frustration. “I’m not some lad in need of a lass’s protection. Or Dewar’s. I told him, I’m perfectly safe on my own. I’m a man grown, and I can make my own way.” And off he strode, toward the treeline.
Leaving her behind.
“Ewan, please,” she called after him. “Please. Now is not the time to argue.” Not when half the village might be looking and listening to them—the woman down the lane had attracted friends and was now pointing their way.
Greer turned the mare for the forest path, but by the time she got through the gate, Ewan was nowhere in sight. “Ewan? Please. This is too important—there is more I need to tell you.”
He made no answer. He had already abandoned her. Again.
Greer hauled in a deep breath to try and draw the sting from the blistering hurt. Every time she thought she had this abominable mess straightened out, everything went wrong. It was everything she could do not to burst into tears in the middle of the lane, so abominable was the hot ache in her throat. Because the cold, awful, worst fact of the matter was that the friend she had made really was the man she loved, but he did not remember her at all.
A man would remember something like that. Someone so important.
She had always thought she was as important to him as he was to her. But evidently not.The thought was enough to make her chest ache so badly it made it hard to breathe.
But breathe she must. And help him, she must, even if he were not yet ready to help himself. Because her memory and knowledge were intact, and she knew things he didn’t.
She knew that the horse Cat Sìth had been returned to Crieff before her arrival, well before Ewan’s “body” had. She knew Ewan was alive, so the burial of body in the graveyard—if there had been a body and not just an empty coffin—had been an elaborate ruse. She knew that Ewan must have been attacked nearer to the Inn at the Bridge of Shee Water on his way home from Edinburgh, because the horse could not have come riderless all the way from Edinburgh.
What she didn’t know was why Dewar had told her Ewan was dead? Except that he had said so in front of Malcolm Cameron—might he have said something different if she had been alone?
More questions for the moorkeeper. Enough questions to go around—she still had not had any letters from Ewan’s ‘disreputable friends’ in Edinburgh. It was enough to make her as mad as a march hare. Madder.
Because when they had robbed Ewan of his memory, they had also robbed her of her future. But it was a future she would not give up without a fight. “Ewan!” she called. “Please! Come to Dalshee.”
But he did not answer back. Clearly, he did not want to be found.
With that particularly discouraging thought, she turned for home, taking the more direct southerly route across the moorland, in the hopes Ewan might follow her to Dalshee on his own.
But without him snugged up tight and warm and strong against her back, the long afternoon shadows lengthened into chill. Still, she was glad of the solitude, and gl
ad of the necessity to direct the horse over the uneven ground so she wouldn’t have to think, wouldn’t have to ponder out all the questions swimming in her head like bream fry in a moorside burn.
“My lady!”
A hot ember of hope had Greer twisting in her saddle, only to snuff itself out at the unwelcome sight of Malcolm Cameron hailing her from some distance behind.
He was not riding Cat Sìth, she noted with some satisfaction, but a gelding fitted with the same curbed bit he had used on the stallion, though such a bridle seemed an over-zealous choice for such a well-trained animal. But Cameron was not alone—behind him was the military-looking man who had quietly advised him that very first day at Crieff, and behind him, on his stout highland pony, was the moorkeeper, Dewar, looking as inscrutable as an old mage.
“Your Grace.” Greer had no choice but to greet them.
He returned the politeness. “My lady, what are you doing this far south on Crieff land?”
“I made a trip to Crieff village, Your Grace.” She gave way to a protective lie. “The bookseller there promised me a copy of…a novel”—she chose the type of story least likely to raise his interest—“I had requested.”
“Never tell me you ride alone.” His tone was incredulous.
“Oh, aye.” She smiled—she had been the recipient of similar looks from men all her life. “Always have, always will.”
“I beg you would curb such impulse,” Malcolm Cameron said. “For I’ve had an alarming report that a dangerous man was seen in the village and disappeared back into these hills. Have you seen anyone?”
Greer at first worked to keep her alarm from her face—they must be speaking of Ewan, and if they had seen him, they had seen her with him—but decided that alarm was just the emotion the situation called for. “I saw and spoke to several people in the village, but no one who might be thought dangerous.” She cast a careful glance at Dewar. “Do you seek him now? All three of you?”
It struck her then as strange that Cameron would attend to such a report himself—Dewar could probably track a man as easily as he could track a stag—without anyone’s help. But Dewar, she could only hope, had no interest in tracking this particular man, if she could somehow communicate to him just whom she had been with—
“Best for the villagers to see that I am a man who tends to my duties no matter how trivial they are,” Cameron answered.
“Indeed,” was all she could think to say to that particular piece of havering. Cameron seemed the kind of man who rarely attended to what he considered trivialities—his handling of his cousin’s funeral was proof enough of that.
“Who did you talk to from the town?” This question was asked by the man behind Malcolm Cameron—his servant or secretary.
And while Greer had no pretentious to snobbery, or acting high in the instep, there was something in his tone, something impolite, or perhaps only dismissive, that stiffened her spine. She raised an eyebrow along with her ire. “And you are?”
“Mr. Gow, my lady.” He belatedly doffed his old-fashioned tricorn hat.
His accent was English—perhaps that accounted for her instinctive distaste.
“Forgive me,” Malcolm Cameron gestured to the man. “Lady Greer, this is my secretary, Gow.”
“Thank you. Mr. Gow.” She acknowledged the introduction with a little bow. “I did come from the village, as I said, and chatted with a number of people”—two was a number, certainly—“as I said, but have not seen a soul on my journey this way.”
“You are fortunate.” Malcolm Cameron gave vent to his concern. “You may not realize how vulnerable you are as a woman alone.”
It was not the first time Greer had heard such sentiments—they were too common to merit anything above notice. But that this man—who knew nothing of the Highlands, or of her life—thought he needed to tell her—who had lived in her own skin—about her vulnerabilities in the world, was laughable. That he felt he needed warn her, who had traveled in the world and felt its perils, was annoying. And that he thought her so insipid or uneducated or uninformed as to be unaware of dangers she assessed every day, was condescending in the extreme. “I most often bring my dogs to ensure my safety, and—”
“Dogs are no match for a man with a gun.”
She disliked his lecturing tone and wanted to scoff at him for thinking her so foolish, or unprepared that she did not have her own gun—indeed her fowling piece, which she had been about to point out to him, was in plain sight, attached as always to her pony’s saddle—but she began to think it best not to antagonize a man so set on being right. “Come, Your Grace, I doubt anyone would want to shoot me.”
“Accidents happen all the time, my lady.” His tone was all grave concern and instruction. “We are in pursuit of a miscreant roaming these glens—this madman seen in the village who haunts these hills. It’s wilderness up there, as Dewar here says, ripe for malefactors, or as your father suggested, poachers armed with powerful long guns for taking game.”
Greer could not understand this violent turn of mind. “I am not a deer, Your Grace, and any moorkeeper, ghillie, or even poacher worth his salt will mark his target very carefully through his glass long before he attempts any shot.” Perhaps it was Cameron’s inexperience with the Highlands that led his to talk in this exaggerated way.
“No indeed,” his smile attempted to be apologetic, but was somehow patronizing. “But raised as you have been—sheltered and alone—you cannot know what men are like.”
She knew exactly what men were like—more often condescending than not, as well as patronizing. “Your Grace, I have been neither sheltered nor alone. I have lived and traveled in the world and on the Continent, amongst a variety of peoples. I have also ridden in these hills all my life. I doubt there is a person, or a stag, or even a tree within a hundred miles that I do not know on sight or by reputation.”
“Yes, of course you do,” he assured her, changing his tone to soothe, as if she were a whinging wean and not a woman full grown. “I should like to hear more of this local knowledge, so I’ll accompany you, if I may.”
He wasn’t asking for her permission.
Greer was about to give him a sharp piece of her mind when she decided it might be cleverer to draw him off by taking him with her, leaving Dewar to misdirect the secretary away from the upland glen and their mutual friend in the bothy.
She gave in with as much good grace as she could muster. “If you insist.”
“I do.” He put his hand over his heart in that gesture that was meant to convey a heartfelt oath-taking. “I feel I must accompany you home. If something were to happen, I could never forgive myself, nor face your father again, if I did not.”
Her pride, she supposed, would not let her acquiesce without having her say. “I am quite safe, Your Grace. Dalshee lands are very nearby, and I know my way by heart, as does my mare.”
“But there is no telling where this blackguard is, or where he will strike next.”
“Strike?” It seemed a rather incendiary word for an injured man who had been living quietly in a bothy. “Has he struck already?”
“Not exactly. But he is a trespasser, my lady, a lawbreaker by definition. Who knows what mischief the miscreant has caused, or what stock he must have stolen to keep himself alive?”
That he had kept himself alive on Dalshee ham and hothouse oranges freely given, did not seem opportune to confess. “Our stockmen have reported no losses,” she said instead. “But we have prudently moved our flocks and herds closer to the home farm at this time of year.”
Talk of agricultural husbandry held no interest for Cameron. He was already turning his mount onto her path. “Nevertheless, I insist.”
“Very well.” She would play along and do what needed to be done for Ewan’s sake, but that did not mean she couldn’t have fun, or have her own way, whilst doing it. “Do try to keep up.” She spared a glance for the others. “Mr. Gow. Dewar.”
Unlike Gow, Dewar tugged his cap deferentially.
“Mileddy.” And she was sure, as she put her heels to her mare’s flank to race her way home, she heard Dewar mutter, “Gie ’im the devil.”
Greer gave the mare her head along the familiar, well maintained paths, urging Nicnevin to just enough speed to bedevil Cameron, until he at last manhandled his poor, double-bitted mount alongside her.
“I am glad of a chance to speak to you alone. I wanted to consult with you, for a fear that something…irregular is going on at Crieff.”
As irregular things were to her certain knowledge going on at Crieff, Greer held her tongue.
“Unseemly things,” he went on.
More unseemly than inheriting a title when the previous incumbent was not yet dead? Honestly, there was too much to choose from.
“You will have noted I am sure, the dreadful irregularity of the funeral—how the casket was inadvertently buried before the service.”
Of all the things he might have said, Greer didn’t know what would have surprised her more. Indeed, she had noted the burial of the unconsecrated casket especially because she thought he had not.
“Gracious,” was all she chose to say while she waited to decide how much of her own knowledge—that the man who was supposed to have been buried in that casket was at that very moment alive and roaming about the moor—to share.
“It has preyed upon my mind as to why that happened,” Cameron went on. “Why the men were instructed to do so, and by whom?”
“Was it not yourself?” For who else could it be? Who else had so little regard for tradition or understanding of protocol? Who else had the authority? It certainly hadn’t been the rector, or the steward, MacIntosh.
“No, indeed.” He was all astonished affront. “I had no idea. But once I learned of the irregularity—the housekeeper…”
“Mrs. Peddie?”
“Ah, yes—Mrs. Peddie felt it her duty to inform me—I wrote straightway to those careless friends of Ewan’s in Edinburgh to ask them what they meant by sending him to us like that. But after their original word of his death—nothing. My inquiries have fallen on deaf ears and idle pens—they have made no reply.”
MAD, BAD & DANGEROUS TO MARRY (The Highland Brides Book 4) Page 17