“Indeed. I thank you.” Cameron’s gaze found Greer’s one last time, but what he meant to convey to her—be careful or be quiet—she could not tell. “I bid you all good day.”
“Tell me something,” Quince Cairn said in a low voice as the room quieted. “What do you think of Malcolm Cameron?”
Greer answered with a question of her own. “Why do you ask?”
“Hmm.” Quince narrowed her eyes and looked at the ceiling as if she were trying to decide. “I thought I detected…” She pleated her lips and scrunched up her nose. “…a decided frisson of…let us call it admiration for you, from Malcolm Cameron.”
“From, I hope, not for.” Greer strove for diplomacy until she could divine the point of the inquiry. “His Grace”—she was careful not to give the game away—“has been very desirous of an alliance between Dalshee and Crieff.”
“Marriage? Do you mean he sought to take up where Ewan left off?” Quince’s eyebrows rose. “That is bold. One almost has to admire his dispatch.”
“Almost.” Greer doubted many things, but her feelings for Ewan, she would not doubt.
“Ah.” The marchioness made a most un-marchioness-like sound of assessment. “Do you like him?”
“Malcolm Cameron? As a suitor? Gracious, no.” Greer could not keep the hot outrage from her voice. “I don’t want you to think I’m not—”
“—entirely devoted to Ewan’s memory. Not at all. But I’m asking something else.” Quince rephrased her question. “Do you like Malcolm Cameron as a person?”
Greer was still not quite sure what Lady Quince Cairn was asking. “I’ve tried.”
“Ah.” Quince’s nodding smile was all satisfaction. “Then the answer is no.”
“I don’t dislike him,” Greer tried for what Mama would want her to say.
“No.” Quince held up a hand to stop her. “None of that. Trust your gut.”
“My what?”
“Your instincts—I see now that you’re much too learned and worldly for guts.” Quince laughed. “And we will talk someday about your Grand Tour as they call it, for I am wildly jealous. But for now, I want to know what your instant reaction was the first moment you met Malcolm Cameron? Tell me quickly—like or dislike?”
“I didn’t like him,” Greer admitted cautiously. “Mostly because he wasn’t Ewan.”
“It doesn’t matter why—that’s just logic and custom and bloody manners trying to talk you out of something you already know. Don’t listen.”
Greer could only smile at such outrageous advice. “My mama says I am a great deal too apt not to listen.”
“I’m sure your mama means well,” Quince said. “So did mine. But it is my experience that a woman’s instincts—her first impressions—about men are nearly always right. You’ve lived in the world—you know what men are like, how they think, what they do when they think they can get away with it. Trust yourself, Greer. I would stake my life on my instinct. I have done, and I must say it’s worked out rather well.”
Greer’s instincts had been what had led her to Ewan. But her instinct also warned her that she—and Ewan, and their future—were on a knife’s edge, poised to go either way. But both choices seemed equally dangerous. “So you think I should distrust Malcolm Cameron.”
“Ah, so it is distrust now, rather than dislike, is it?” Quince leaned in. “Better and better. And for what it’s worth, I don’t like him one bit either—I shouldn’t even trust his skinny arse with a fart.”
“Gracious!” But Quince’s plain talk inspired Greer’s trust in a way that Cameron’s flattery had not.
“If you are through shocking everyone, my dear?” The marquess’s dry remark reminded Greer that they were not alone. “My wife asks, because your letters set up a great many questions. But the unhappy fact of the matter is that we know less about Ewan’s death than you.”
“Were you not with him? In Edinburgh?”
The marquess shook his head. “I was not, though Archie saw him there. But I saw him last at Cairn, a little more than a month ago. He was on his way to Edinburgh, on some legal matters, as I recall.” His gaze went from Greer to his wife. “Strengthening the entail in favor of the children he hoped very soon to have.”
Children. It was something she had thought of in the abstract—something that would occur eventually after her marriage, someday in the future. But Ewan had been making concrete plans for that future, making room for a family of his own, while she had not thought beyond the two of them, alone, being together at last.
But they were plans he would no longer remember.
The enormity of her loss—the seemingly endless tumble of grief—knocked the wind out of her. Her lungs burned with the effort to draw breath.
She knew she ought to be rejoicing that Ewan was alive. But if he was not the same Ewan that she had known—if he didn’t know her— It was enough to break her fractured heart into a hundred tiny, aching pieces.
But whether he remembered her or not, Ewan still need her help. “And so you were not with him, in Edinburgh, or when he was attacked.” Greer forced herself to be logical. “Have you any idea who was with him? I had understood from Ewan that you were close-knit friends?”
“We were none of us with him, my lady,” the Marquess of Cairn answered. “Neither I, nor Archie, nor Mr. Rory Cathcart, who consulted with me in London on some business regarding Ewan even before we got your sad news.”
“But ‘those disreputable friends,’ Malcolm Cameron said. He said he received word from them. I’m sorry, but I thought it must be you—for he spoke of no others, Ewan did.”
“Nay.” Archie Carrington shook his head. “I can’t imagine there were others. I did see Ewan in Edinburgh. We shared a dinner together at the New Club there and drank a toast to his good fortune and happiness in marriage. And I saw him home—we walked together—before I returned to my own house, some streets away. He made no mention of any plan to go out ‘carousing,’ as your letters to us said, but only to go home to Crieff and be married.”
“Then does no one know what happened to him that day by the Shee?” Greer could not keep the surge of fresh grief and outrage from her voice. “Was he all alone?”
“What do you mean?” Alasdair’s voice turned sharp and prosecutorial. “That day by the Shee? Your letter said Edinburgh. And you just said attacked, when your letter stated that Ewan’s death was an accident.”
“Aye, but I know differently now.” Greer drew in a deep breath and looked them in the eyes, one after another, before she could decide whom to trust.
Nay, she trusted Ewan, even if he didn’t trust himself. And all his life, Ewan had trusted these men, who had demonstrated their devotion time and again, most recently by hieing all the way from London to speak to her of their concerns.
Trust your instinct as a woman, Quince Cairn had just said.
And so she would. “Ewan isn't dead.”
There were gasps—of horror from Mama, who had just returned, and avid interest from Quince Cairn. “Really?”
“Greer!” Her father said from the door with his long-suffering, cautionary tone, only to be superseded by the Marquess of Cairn, whose steely tone took command.
“Lady Greer, you interest me. Tell me more.”
“Now, Greer,” her father tried again, “You mustn’t let your feelings lead you to make foolish—”
“Pray hear me out before you dismiss me.” Greer spoke over her father for the first time in her life. But she was done with censoring and distrusting herself. “I am not always as rational as you might like, but I can weigh the evidence I have seen with my own eyes. And Ewan is not dead—he is the man we found on the road to Crieff.”
“Holy stolen dukedoms,” Quince said.
“Perhaps,” Greer cautioned. “He doesn’t remember what happened—Ewan can’t tell me how he was injured. And”—she hesitated only a moment before trusting them with the whole of the truth—“he doesn’t remember himself as Duke of Crieff. The be
ating injured him badly—broke his nose and his ribs—and gave him a…brain commotion, is what he called it.”
The marquess went deathly still. “Do you mean he’s lost his faculties?”
“I don’t know.” This was the awful truth she had not wanted to accept for herself. “His memory has returned some, slowly, in fits and starts. And I took him to the village this noontime, where an ostler from the Inn at the Bridge over Shee Water recognized him—as Duke of Crieff. So it’s not my foolish fancy, Papa.” She could see her father wanting to break in to object. “It’s true.”
“Where is he now?” Alasdair was on his feet, as if he would charge up the moor side that very minute to find his lost friend.
“I don’t rightly know,” Greer was forced to admit. “We parted in the village. He was staying in a bothy hidden in the glens on Crieff land. I tried to get him to come here, to be safe. Because this mad miscreant—the potential poacher Malcolm Cameron was talking about seeking,” she clarified. “I fear he means Ewan.”
“Does Malcolm Cameron know his cousin lives?” Alasdair asked.
“I think not,” she decided. “I don’t see how he could know—Ewan has been hidden away so completely. And when I met Cameron at the forest gate, he said he was only investigating some report of a stranger in the village.” But even as she said the words, Greer knew they could not be entirely true—whoever had seen Ewan must have also seen her, who was no stranger to the village. “But Cameron also said he feared something was amiss with Ewan’s burial. And there was”—she looked to her parents for confirmation—“because the coffin was buried before the service. But he blamed that on you, or at least on Ewan’s ‘disreputable friends in Edinburgh.’”
She tried to weave the tangled threads of what she knew into some logical line of thought, but there were too many loose ends, too many questions still unanswered.
“And are you on good”—Alasdair paused—“or friendly terms with him, my Lord Shee?”
“Neighborly terms,” Papa supplied diplomatically. “We were just concluding an agreement on the sale of a small parcel of land.”
“Unentailed land that might raise cash?” Alasdair asked boldly.
“Aye!” Greer answered before her father could shush her. “Why do you ask that, in particular?”
“Because, not only have your questions become ours,” Archie Carrington said. “But we’ve more questions of our own, especially in light of a conversation I had with the last member of our foursome—”
“The quadrumvirate, he called you.”
“I don’t think that is even a real word.” Alasdair sent a fond smile to his wife before he added, “Shockingly un-scholastic, our Ewan, in matters other than agricultural.”
Greer could feel the dry humor and true affection for Ewan in Alasdair’s voice. How strange—and wonderful—it was to meet the men Ewan had described so perfectly. How wonderful it would be for Ewan to have them back to resuscitate his memories. “The fourth member would be Mr. Rory Cathcart?”
“Aye. Rory is employed as an expert in the appraisal of art at Mr. Christie’s auction house in London. But your letter had not yet reached him when he first contacted us in some alarm.” Archie leaned forward, eager to share his confidences. “Because he had been astonished to find that the auction house had received a consignment of particular paintings from Crieff—paintings we knew Ewan had collected. But more importantly, he found that the consignment had come from His Grace, the Duke of Crieff, Lord Malcolm Cameron. Which meant that our friend, Ewan Cameron, must be dead. And yet, we none of us had heard anything—no notice had been put in the paper, no letter from this Malcolm Cameron, of whom we had never heard anything beyond his being a nuisance of a spendthrift cousin.”
“Spendthrift?” This was an entirely new characterization of Cameron—one entirely at odds with his own memorable statements regarding Crieff’s solvency.
“Ewan had, over the years, shared some concerns regarding his cousin with me,” Alasdair clarified. “So when Rory aired his concerns, I wrote Malcolm Cameron directly. But I received no reply. You, Lady Greer, were the one who wrote instead. And that your questions squared so completely with mine, saw me resolved to come to Dalshee with all haste.”
“I am sure, His Grace, Malcolm Cameron, would have answered, in time, but…” Mama tried for her usual diplomacy, but even she had to cast about to excuse Cameron’s behavior. “His Grace has been rather beleaguered by his new duties.”
Alasdair raised one sardonic eyebrow. “Not so beleaguered that he didn’t immediately crate up, and ship to London for immediate consignment, more than a dozen important paintings that Ewan had collected over the years.”
Greer’s heart began to gallop as if she were running upstairs, trying to keep up with her racing mind.
“There is worse. Or at least more,” Archie Carrington said. “After consultation, Alasdair recalled that Ewan had mention his cousin was rather fond of horse racing.”
“‘Making alarming bets with dangerous people,’ was actually what Ewan said,” the marquess clarified.
“Exactly,” Mr. Carrington agreed. “So spurred by your inquiry, Rory’s consignment, and Alasdair’s memory, I made my way north from London along the horse-racing circuit, during which I established that Malcolm Cameron is heavily in debt.”
Greer let out the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. “Personally in debt—debts of honor—and not debts as Crieff?”
“Indeed, accrued before he came into the title, I reckon, and therefore personal debts of honor, as you said. But you will be more astonished at the amount,” Carrington vowed. “Malcolm Cameron is in deep waters, not only with money lenders in London, where he kept an expensive bachelor residence at Albany until recently, but at nearly every town with a race track the length of the countryside. Grahambury Park, Newark-on-Trent, Doncaster, Leith—the list is comprehensive.”
“And all of the debts outstanding?” She wanted to be very clear. “None of them settled?”
“To my certain knowledge,” Mr. Carrington pledged, “nary a one. He has yet to raise the necessary funds.”
“Gracious.” She sat back in her own chair to think of the ramifications. “No wonder he is selling off anything that is not tied down to the entail.” So many new questions arose in her mind that she couldn’t quickly sort them all. “What is to be done?”
“Well, to begin with, Rory, that is Mr. Cathcart, has made a bureaucratic sleight of hand, and bought up Ewan’s paintings on our accounts before they could go to auction, but for considerably less than what we now know Malcolm Cameron owes. So while Malcolm Cameron will be able to pay at least some of his bills, Ewan’s legacy will not be entirely lost.”
“Thank you. That is very generous of you.” It was an elegant and practical solution but did not quiet the alarm ringing like a kirk bell in her brain.
The alarm that told her it was mighty convenient that a man so heavily in debt should come into a dukedom capable of providing him with ready money to pay such bills. Holy stolen dukedoms, indeed. The alarm that grew louder and louder at the realization that Malcolm Cameron might be actively seeking—nay, hunting—Ewan because someone in the village might have recognized him.
Questions and alarm that her three guests seemed to share and might help her in answering. “Please, you must stay here at Dalshee as our guests. I should be glad of the company and conversation of people who knew Ewan better than I.” She looked quickly to her mama for confirmation.
“Of course,” Mama demurred. “We should be very glad of your company.”
After a quick glance between their three visitors, Quince, accepted readily. “If it is truly not too much trouble, that would be lovely.”
“We thank you.” Alasdair added. “We, too, should be glad of the company and conversation of people who knew Ewan in a different way than the rest of us. I should think you knew him far better than the rest of us, Lady Greer, for he shared his thoughts with you.”
The compliment was bittersweet—for those thoughts might be forever gone.
“He talked about you often, you know,” Alasdair went on. “His lucky penny in his palm, he called you. Always made time for his letters home, as he called all of them, no matter where they went. He knew, even when we were young, that you were his home.”
The heat in her throat made it hard to speak. “Thank you.” Greer did not bother to hide the stinging tears slipping out of the corner of her eyes. “We must do all we can to find him as quickly as possible and bring him home before it’s too late.”
Lady Greer Douglas
Dalshee House
Perthshire, Scotland
2 May, 1790
Dear Lady Greer,
I am reprieved at last and find myself at last at liberty to head home for the term break. I am therefore more than eager to see if we might finally—finally—arrange for our meeting upon Glas Maol. Grandfather has hinted in his letters that he should like to arrange for a more formal visit of your family to Castle Crieff, but I should prefer our meeting to take place on our terms and not in front of others’ watchful eyes—I daresay neither my grandfather, nor your father, would allow me to kiss you the way I want, and the way you deserve for waiting so patiently for me these many years.
I also bring home the most delightful collegiate companion—a spaniel dog puppy out of Alasdair’s superb bitch Meade. The dog is the honey-gold color of his dam and puts me in mind of another person who is said to have honey-gold hair—you. And so, I entrust to you the naming of his merry wee fellow who shall, I hope and trust, in future years be our companion at Crieff. Already he is my steadfast and most loyal friend, and my reminder that someday soon, I shall be back at Crieff for good, where we can all be happy and together.
Pray let me know at Crieff, where I shall await your answer from Thursday next, when I arrive at last at home.
MAD, BAD & DANGEROUS TO MARRY (The Highland Brides Book 4) Page 19