A Question for Harry

by Angeline Fortin

  Glenrothes shifted, his anger succumbing to discomfort. “Perhaps this is not something I really wish to hear.”

  “No more than I would rather not speak of it,” Aylesbury admitted. “But I feel I must. I cannot have you imagining the worst and envisioning my head on the proverbial platter.”

  The earl closed his eyes for a moment as if begging for strength. That not being enough for him it seemed, Glenrothes rose, crossed to the sideboard, and poured himself a glass of what Aylesbury knew was the best Scotch whiskey to be had. He lifted the glass, saying, “I might need this to brace myself for what I am to hear from you.”

  Aylesbury chuckled. “I might need one just to say it.”

  Glenrothes snorted but did pour a second glass before topping off his own. Joining the earl at the sideboard, Aylesbury took his glass and a welcoming sip.

  There was a reason they called it Dutch courage. It gave a man the balls to do things he’d rather not.

  To say things he’d rather not.

  Fiona’s brother remained standing near the sideboard so Aylesbury did not resume his seat, though he did think to remove himself from the earl’s arm’s length … just in case.

  “All right then, go ahead.”

  It took a deep, fortifying breath and another longer sip of the whiskey before Aylesbury could speak. “That night of the ball at Haddington’s, I was out in the gardens ruminating upon my failure to secure a mistress for Aylesbury once again.”

  “Ruminating?”

  “I was fairly deep in my cups by that point,” Aylesbury clarified. “In truth, I was also avoiding Fiona. She had been… pestering me. Pardon me, I hate to use that word, but she had moved beyond subtle hints – but she was pestering me for a dance that night. A waltz specifically, but I simply could not waltz with her.”

  “Why …?” The earl paused as understanding struck and grunted. “So that’s how it was.”

  “That’s how it was,” Aylesbury nodded, tipping back his glass. “I shouldn’t have been drinking as much as I was, all things considered. You fellows do stock the finest whiskey though. So I can perhaps blame you to some degree for what happened when Fiona found me out there in the garden as I was – as I said – fairly deep in my cups.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  From the diary of Lady Fiona MacKintosh – April 1893

  It was utterly horrid. Mortifying! Humiliating! I cannot think that I will ever be able to speak of it should anyone dare ask.

  Their dinner arrived, allowing Fiona a few moments to gather her thoughts, her composure, as Ilona joined her at a small table near the fireplace to dine. “Well, as I said, Aylesbury had been ignoring me,” Fiona prevaricated as she dipped into her soup.

  “Studiously. Yes, you said that part,” Ilona reminded, ignoring her own meal with a grimace. “Then what happened?”

  “Well, he had been diligently avoiding me all night that night, so when I saw him slip out into the gardens, I followed him,” Fiona told her between spoonsful.

  “That was very bold,” Ilona said carefully.

  Fiona laughed then, lifting her napkin to her lips before tossing it aside. “Considering all I had already done to gain his attention without much success, I thought it quite tame really. But I was so damnedly, dementedly in love with him, I simply couldn’t comprehend that somewhere deep down, he didn’t feel the same. So I decided to take my one last chance. I went out there to prove to myself that I was right, that he did love me more than he had ever loved Moira. Ahh, Ilona, I was such a foolish child, wasn’t I?”

  “I don’t know, I might have done the same with Colin if he had ever ignored me so. I was quite determined to have him. Much the same as you.”

  “Aye, I was. There he was in the garden. The night was warm for spring, the music drifting from the house. It was such a romantic setting and he … he was so bloody handsome, damn him,” Fiona recalled. “I couldn’t help myself. I went to him … ha! Oh, Ilona, I ran to him. I threw myself into his arms before he could say a word about it, yea or nay.”

  “There you are, Harry!” she had exclaimed, lacing her arms around his neck. “I’ve been looking for you!”

  “I assure you, I didn’t invite her to join me there,” Aylesbury assured Glenrothes. “ I certainly didn’t encourage her. Bold as brass, she came up and threw her arms around my neck without so much as a by-your-leave. She was … well, shall we say there before I had a chance to put together any sort of defense, saying something about me looking lonely or some such nonsense. I had enough presence of mind to try to pull her off of me but she was rather like a barnacle, and as I said …”

  “You were fairly deep in your cups,” the earl supplied drily

  “Quite so,” Aylesbury nodded crisply, rocking back on his heels. “She said something like,‘There you are, Harry’ and naturally I told her she should not address me so familiarly. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Abby does. Moira does.’ To which I promptly reminded her that while that might be so, Lady Glenrothes certainly did not address me so. Do you know what she said to that?”

  Glenrothes shook his head.

  Aylesbury swirled his whiskey around the rim of the glass, fondly recalling her words. “I remember it quite clearly, despite my inebriated state. She said – ever so saucily, mind you – ‘Ah but then you never courted Eve, did you?’”

  “I should hope not.” There was just a hint of humor reflected in Glenrothes’ eye, though.

  “Impudent piece of baggage.” He was chuckling into his glass as he tipped it up.

  “She is that,” Glenrothes agreed, taking another long drink as well. “Then what? Surely that cannot be all?”

  “Then I kissed him,” Fiona confessed. “I had tried to before, of course …”

  “Fiona!”

  “Humph, like you never kissed Colin before you wed!”

  “Not until we were engaged!” Ilona replied primly, though her lips were twitching.

  “In any case, I kissed him and the next thing I knew he was kissing me back. Not just a mere peck, either.” Fiona lifted her fingers to her lips, lost in the memory. Harry had kissed her then, her first real kiss. Deeply. Sensually. His fingers threading through her hair, forcing her head back so that he could devour her more completely. He had wanted her, even then, she realized. The way he had pressed her up against that tree …

  “Fiona?”

  “The way his kissed me, as shocking as it was, was the most thrilling moment of my life,” Fiona told her with some understatement. In fact she had been desperate with yearning, taken about by the force of her ardor. Had Harry felt the same? “It was rather earth-shattering really. I felt it to the tips of my toes. And the way he held me! His arms nearly crushed me against him. I was …”

  “… Simply appalled with myself,” Aylesbury confessed.

  “But not so appalled that you stopped,” Glenrothes ground out tightly, his fingers whitening around his glass.

  “But I did,” Aylesbury insisted. “Perhaps not as promptly as I should have.” Not promptly at all. He had been so hungry for her, ravenous after weeks and months of cumulative desire. Months of telling her: No. Of telling himself no. He had kissed her in a manner quite at odds with her lack of experience, but she had met him kiss for kiss, urging him on until he had been ready to take her up against a tree with all the urgency that had been accruing in him. The realization of what he had been about and with whom had hit him like a cold bucket of water. Aylesbury cleared his throat. “Admittedly, I should have never let it go so far. Finally I pushed her away and told her rather rudely to return to the house.” Like a good little girl, he had said and perhaps even patted her on the head, as well. It was a lowering memory, how he had hurt Fiona to save himself.

  “She told me then that she was in love with me.” His throat tightened unexpectedly and Aylesbury lifted his glass again to soothe the burning at the back of his throat with something more fiery. She had laid her heart before him, gifted him with something so precious and
he had tossed it back at her like so much garbage.

  “What did he say?”

  Fiona closed her eyes, recalling her desperate confession, rashly declared after he had already pushed her away from him. Scolded her like a child. Her chest tightened, reliving the heartbreak of that moment. So terrible but nothing compared with what was to come.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, not straight away.” Fiona’s voice tightened with the painful memory. “He just stared at me with such an appalled expression on his face…”

  “I was dumbfounded by her confession, of course,” Aylesbury admitted, the words nothing compared to the emotion of that night. “Disbelieving. You have to understand that I had convinced myself that she was too young to have anything greater than an infatuation for me, that she was merely flirting with me all along. Practicing, as it were. Honing her skills. So I said …”

  “She told you that she loved you and you said what?”

  The threat was back in Glenrothes voice but Aylesbury couldn’t find it in himself to be wary any longer. “Much that is regrettable,” was all he offered, sparing them both the embarrassment of recounting what had followed. Sparing Fiona from having even one brother possess the intimate details of how gravely he had humiliated her. What had come next, what he had said to her! He hated himself for those words. Words born from the desperation to make her flee before he did something he would really regret. Instead he regretted it all. Even more now, knowing how deeply her emotions had truly run.

  She had first tried to kiss him again, to renew his unexpected passion, but Aylesbury would have nothing of it. From there things had gone from bad to worse. Instead of walking away and managing to retain even a shred of her dignity, she had clung to him, confessing her love again, begging him – begging him! – to love her back. He couldn’t possibly love her, he had scoffed. But he had kissed her, she protested! Had kissed her like a woman …

  “He pushed me away, said it was nothing. That it was just a kiss, like a hundred before. Of course even then I could not leave the matter alone. I argued that it was not. That it was so special and that I loved him so dearly.” Her face flamed at the mortifying confession.

  “Oh, Fiona.”

  “His words became even more brutal then. He said that I was nothing more than a child, far too young for him. Far too spoiled,” Fiona told Ilona quietly, turning Harry’s ring around her ring with her thumbnail. Harry had said that his marchioness would be a woman of polish and sophistication, not a child in the nursery, a spoiled little girl who knew nothing of the love of a person, just love of a novelty. A child who needed to grow up. How could he possibly love a child like that? Fiona swallowed hard as the old pain welled up in her once more.

  “Oh dear.” Ilona patted her hand consolingly. “That must have hurt.”

  Fiona agreed with only an abrupt nod. It had been devastating and should have sent her to her knees but oddly enough, even after having her heart trod upon so cruelly, it had only served to anger her. Her Scots temper had exploded.

  There was nothing he regretted more in his life than the cold-hearted bastard he had become that night. He’d been drunk but not drunk enough. Desperate to escape temptation but even all that could not excuse his reprehensible words. It would serve him right if Fiona could never forgive him. If she could never bring herself to love him again.

  “That was about it,” Aylesbury said. “She slapped me – quite hard, I might add. She’s got a hell of an arm on her – and then I walked away with her cursing me as I went.”

  “…slapped him with all I was worth, instead.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Ilona gaped. “You hit him? And what did he do?”

  “Nothing.” A chuckle of disbelief escaped Fiona as she brushed away the tears on her cheeks, tears she hadn’t even known were falling. “He bowed like the consummate gentleman he is and walked away. Naturally, I could not manage a ladylike and contained response even after he had laid me so low. Instead I ran after him and yelled at him that he had had his one and only chance with me and that one day he would be sorry.”

  “Oh, my goodness, Fiona!” she repeated. “You always did have such panache!”

  “You deserve a fair beating for being such a callous bastard.”

  “I do,” Aylesbury said just as agreeably.

  Glenrothes did not act on what might be taken as Aylesbury’s permission to be used as a punching bag. Instead, he was silent for a long moment before he asked, “Were you lying? When you said that it meant nothing to you””

  “Only to myself,” Aylesbury admitted. “Looking back I wish I had handled it all very differently.”

  “How differently?” Glenrothes asked with a menacingly raised brow.

  “Nothing untoward, I promise you. I was lucid enough by that point to keep my head.”

  Examining his nails for a moment, Aylesbury considered his next words carefully. “I was a fool, Glenrothes, but the truth of the matter is that I was quite taken with Fiona almost from the moment we met. She was everything that the ladies of the ton were not. Honest, open. Natural. It was admittedly intriguing. It was everything I could do to remind myself of her position, her age … including reminding her of it as well. Again and again as if that might make it all simply go away.”

  Everything he said to her that night was meant to drive her away. Each word worse than the one before when they proved ineffective. He had needed to make her hate him and it had worked all too well. “I deserve some kudos, really, all things considered. I kept my distance, Glenrothes. I stayed away.”

  “I appreciate that. That single fact probably saved your life.”

  “Harry left Edinburgh a few days later and I hadn’t seen him since until that night at the ball. All that time I hated him for breaking my heart so cruelly. It is still the one thing I have not forgiven him for, but lately, I have begun to see it all from his side,” Fiona admitted staring down at his ring.

  “His side?”

  “Aylesbury is an honorable man; I should have known he would never seduce me or allow himself to be seduced. Still, I threw myself at his head and he did everything that he could to let me down gently. Before that night, at any rate. I suppose in the end, I deserved him having to be so blunt about it all. He has said that I am tenacious to a fault. I suppose I actually provoked all his slights by not backing off graciously. He must have been truly desperate to go on as he did.”

  It was incredible looking back now, that she could see it all so differently. With a sigh of regret, Fiona lifted haunted eyes to her friend and sister. “Oh Ilona! Is it possible? Did I leave him no choice?”

  Aylesbury laughed at Glenrothes’ softly spoken words. “It would have been worth it, I think. Fiona was … is temptation personified. Yes, I fought it. Fought her. Fought myself. I was incredibly attracted to her. She lived so passionately, taking the world on her own terms. Her effervescence was contagious. And despite her tomboyish ways, lingering on the fringes of womanhood as she was, she was lovely, feminine. Fiery. I wanted her badly… Perhaps I should not have admitted so much to you.”

  Glenrothes shifted uncomfortably. “Perhaps not.”

  “But I did,” Aylesbury repeated anyway and released a sigh. “It is nice to finally admit that. I know as her brother you don’t want to hear that but as a man who loves a woman as you do the countess, I’m certain you can understand. Looking back, I wish I had acknowledged – if only to myself – that I loved her even then.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “She was just a girl.”

  “She was eighteen,” Glenrothes pointed out. “An age when many women wed. If it weren’t acceptable, they wouldn’t be thrown out into Society at that age.”

  “As I’ve told Fiona, having a sister just her age meant acknowledging Fiona as a woman grown, which would have meant extending the same courtesy to Piper. But that isn’t the whole of it. There was my friendship with you, your brothers. Also over the years,
I had thought myself in love many a time. It never lasted,” Aylesbury admitted, unable to comprehend that he was confessing so much, and to Glenrothes no less. “I suppose on some level, I had no desire to lead Fiona on, only to break her heart when I came to my senses, as I was sure I would. She deserved happiness. A happiness I was sure she would find without me.”

  Ilona clasped Fiona to her for a long hug. “So what now?”

  Fiona held out her hand to show her sister-in-law the ring. “Now he says he loves me and wants to marry me.”

  “It’s lovely,” Ilona said, fingering the diamond before squeezing Fiona’s hand. “You said yes?”

  Fiona shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “No?” Her sister-in-law blinked in surprise. “Why ever not? Haven’t you forgiven him? Truly, in your heart?”

  Being able to talk about everything that had happened between them had been incredibly cathartic, purging her of the last of the hurt and humiliation in a way that her bitter vexation had never been able to manage. She felt free at last. “Yes.”

  “And you love him?”

  Fiona rotated his ring around her finger. What was it then that was holding her back? What was it that kept her from admitting what she knew was true? She loved Harry, more than she had ever imagined possible. “I want to trust him …”

  “Not to break your heart again?” Ilona asked perceptively. “Wouldn’t it break your heart more to spend the rest of your life without him?”

  “Yes, but what if…”

  “What?”

  Then Fiona realized what was holding her back from taking a chance on Harry. It had little to do with him and much to do with her and her expectations. “What if what Harry and I have doesn’t fulfill all my desires? What if we cannot find what you have? I want to have the same bliss shining on my face that I see on yours every day. And on Eve’s, on Francis’, on Abby’s…” Fiona sighed. “What if it isn’t all I hoped for?”