In the midst of this unseemly Scottish display in the breakfast room, a footman appeared at the door. “Mr. Billings, sir.”
The butler frowned like thunder. “Do not interrupt, Franklin. His Grace is at table.”
“Yes, sir. It’s only that, the housemaids were just cleaning the library. And they found this.”
Harry turned to see a slim leather volume held in Franklin’s white-gloved hand. It was a volume of poetry by Robert Burns that he had hoped to give Mary Elizabeth, but had not yet had the chance. He accepted the volume, wondering why his well-trained staff had thought to interrupt his breakfast over a trifle, when he opened it to find a bit of blue-and-green plaid tucked into it like a bookmark. It was the same plaid he had woken to find in his bed that morning.
“Our hunting tartan,” Robert Waters said.
“How lovely,” Catherine said.
Harry thought it pretty, too, and was pleased to know that it was a gift from his bride. But it marked a place in the book over a maudlin song about a lover who would return to his beloved, though “it t’were ten thousand miles.”
He felt a bit sick even before he opened the letter from Mary Elizabeth pressed into the book. She had written in a fine hand, much better than he would have expected her ever to acquire, with all her hunting and fishing and riding horses to their doom—and his.
He did not have to read the words aloud. Indeed, he could not, so it was just as well that Robert and Alex knew their sister well enough that he need not speak at all.
“She’s done a runner,” Robert groused. He swore aloud, and his wife whacked him a second time with her otherwise useless fan. She must have kept it about her person for the sole purpose of chastising her errant husband when he went astray, which no doubt was often.
Harry found himself thinking these inane things, trying to repress the knowledge that Mary Elizabeth had left him.
In spite of his best efforts, he failed.
Twenty-eight
Harry sent down to the stables to make certain that Sampson was still there. He did this, though Mary Elizabeth had written in her note that she had taken the mail coach to Aberdeen. She hoped to find a cousin to take her the rest of the way from there to Glenderrin. Harry was not sure why he believed her, since she had also said she loved him, and the night before she had said more than once that she would marry him. He was not sure what he believed now, other than that his heart hurt and he did not know what to do about it.
He left the breakfast room and retreated into the duchess’s sitting room, where no one would come that time of day, not even the duchess herself. The south-facing lawn touched the rose garden, where he’d had his first real conversation with Mary. He knew he should make plans to go after her, but what was to stop her from running a second time? If she did not want him, she did not want him. Or if she only wanted to be his friend, who occasionally rolled around with him in his bed, he could not change that either.
Harry stood watching the sunlight move across the green of his mother’s lawn, trying to remember the last time he had felt like this. Perhaps when his father had died and he had been left with the burden of the duchy once and for all. But there had been relief in his father’s death, too, the peace of being released from a burden of loving a man who would never love him back. There was no relief in Mary Elizabeth’s desertion. Only pain.
“So you’ve come in here to sulk.”
He tensed. “Hello, Mother.”
Harry did not turn to her but continued to look out the french doors. He knew that he should rouse himself to pack, that the journey to Scotland was a long and cold one. He supposed he should take the carriage, as he would need it to bring her back. Part of him wondered if he should simply follow her on Sampson and deal with matters of carriages and returns once he had her in hand and her signature on the marriage license in his pocket. He made these plans halfheartedly, for he was not sure he could bring himself to chase a woman who made love with him one hour and fled him the next—a woman who did not love him as she had said she did.
His mother had not left him alone, as he had hoped she might. Why he had taken refuge from the prying eyes of his guests in one of her rooms, and not down at the stables, Harry could not fathom. Though his mother leaned heavily on her gilded cane, she looked as fierce as she had when he was small and she had defended him to his father. He waited for a tirade about the faithlessness of foolish women, but it did not come.
“Licking your wounds is all well and good, I suppose, Harry, but you’re losing daylight.”
He felt the sting of her censure but distantly, as he felt everything but the ache over his heart. He turned to contemplate her, knowing that she was trying to bait him into action. He found that he loved her for it.
“It’s summer, Mama. There is plenty of daylight left.”
“You think she’s left you of her own accord because she does not love you enough.”
“She does not love me at all.”
“Balderdash!” The duchess rapped her cane once, hard, on the black-and-white parquet floor. The floor was of polished tile and gave off a nice ring. Neither her speech nor her noise impressed him, however. He knew what he knew.
His knowledge did not keep his mother from speaking, however. “Anyone with eyes in their head can see that she loves you. She never does any outlandish thing but that she looks to you to see how you’ll take it. She leaves her precious tartan with no one but places it in a book for you to keep. She loves you more than she should after only a few days’ acquaintance, just as you love her.”
Harry listened to all this, acknowledging it. These facts were not evidence in his favor but simply ideas his mother spouted to make him feel better. He wanted to be moved by them, but found that he was not.
He was trying to find a way to let his mother down easy, while also motivating himself to make a decision, when he heard a second, quiet voice from the doorway.
“Your mother is right.”
Harry turned to look at Lady Anna of Glenderrin. She was more beautiful than any woman her age had a right to be, her blonde curls untouched by time, her face cut only here and there by subtle lines—lines that did not detract from the curves of her face but softened them. Her blue eyes, dark as the sea in midwinter, stared at him.
He felt he should rouse himself to acknowledge her, as she was Mary Elizabeth’s mother, whatever conflicts passed between her and the woman he loved. He bowed to her. He found that he could not force even a false smile. He tried to fall back on good manners and failed there as well.
“Good morning, Lady Anna. And how find you the ducal hospitality this morning?”
“Lovely, I thank you. But I am not here to discuss the marmalade. I am here to take the blame for my daughter’s folly.”
Harry listened for a moment, to see if she might say something more. He did not think that Mary Elizabeth was driven by folly, but by desperation, though he was not ready to argue the point with her relations.
“You are not to blame, my lady. Mary Elizabeth is a free woman, with freewill, and she excels in using it.”
Lady Anna smiled a little then, and for the first time, Harry saw the light of love come into her eyes. He had thought perhaps that Mary Elizabeth and her wild ways were nothing but a burden to this refined woman, but he began to see in that moment that perhaps he had been wrong.
“I ordered her to marry you or to go back to London.”
Harry listened to those words, then replayed them in his head, wondering why they should sound so strange. “You ordered Mary Elizabeth to marry me?”
“I ordered her to choose. I gave her an ultimatum: she must marry you or return to the South to find a different husband.”
Harry felt a bit of the ice around his heart begin to melt. Some of the ache in his chest began to ease, even as anger, like distant thunder, called for his attention. But the most impo
rtant words—ultimatum and ordered her to choose—were the sounds that he heard most clearly.
“To do such a thing would be to assure yourself that Mary does the opposite,” Harry said. “Do you object to our alliance, then?”
“No,” Lady Anna said. “I thought she would obey me. In important things, she always has.”
“Until now.”
“Yes.”
“Madam, I fear you do not know your daughter as well as you should.”
He saw that there were tears standing in Lady Anna’s eyes and that one had lost its way, winding down her cheek. Those tears did not garner his sympathy, but they did make his anger burn a little less. He worked to keep hold of his temper, knowing from past experience what the fires of his wrath could do.
“I do not know her at all, I fear. I never have. And with this last debacle, I fear I never will. Her father will be furious with me for driving her to such a pass. As he should be. As you are.”
The lady sank onto one of his mother’s uncomfortable settees and drew out a handkerchief. His mother sat beside her and patted her arm.
“I know I seem a monster. I do not mean to burden her or you. But she is a headstrong girl, and left to herself, she truly would have lived out her life on her father’s moors, chasing deer in the bracken and hunting grouse, until one day she woke and found herself thirty years old and childless, and that the love of her family, such a comfort in her youth, was only a burden. She would watch her nieces and nephews grow and thrive, and never have a child of her own. And she would have been miserable, all because I did not intervene and make her marry when I should have.”
Harry could almost see Mary Elizabeth climbing through thickets in breeches, a gun in the crook of her arm, a game bag over her shoulder. Had she stayed in Glenderrin, as her mother had said, he would never have known her. He would never have known that love was possible for him. He would have selected one of the most sensible women he could find, and he would have made her his duchess. No doubt he would have come to love that phantom woman, over time, after a fashion, but he would never have known a love like the one he felt for Mary now.
And if Mary Elizabeth had ever thought to come down from her Scottish fastness at all, he would have seen her and loved her and been able to offer her nothing.
Harry swallowed hard. His anger had gone. “Thank you for bringing her out of the bracken,” he said.
He crossed the room and offered her his hand. Lady Anna took it and wept harder. He sat down beside her, almost crowding both women off the settee with his bulk. He did not stand on ceremony, but took Mary’s mother in his arms and held her while she wept.
“I’ll go and find her,” he said. “I’ll bring her back.”
Robert and Alex Waters had both been standing in the doorway, it seemed. They came in then, and their wives with them. Both ladies seemed to be sniffling into handkerchiefs as well, and Harry knew he had lost control of the situation entirely, if, indeed, he had ever had it.
“No, Your Worship,” Robert Waters said. “You won’t bring her here. You’ll go to her. And we’ll come with you.”
Alex Waters shot his brother a look, which silenced him briefly. In the interim, Alex nodded to Harry. “I would like to officially invite you and yours to our place in the Highlands. Come to Glenderrin for the Gathering, and bide awhile with my kin.”
The duchess opened her mouth to speak, but Harry spoke for her. “We accept. I thank you. Might I trouble you to see to it that my mother and yours are safely brought to Glenderrin?”
“Of course,” Alex said. “And where will you be?”
“I’ll be riding ahead on Sampson. I’ve got a stubborn woman to catch, and as my mother mentioned an hour ago, I’m losing daylight.”
Twenty-nine
Mary Elizabeth made it to Aberdeen in two and a half days, which was why she had taken the mail coach in the first place. She had wanted safety and speed and a chance to think. One out of the three eluded her.
All she could think of was what Harry’s feelings must have been when he woke up and found her gone. Slipping away in the night had made perfect sense when she was still with him, his body and his love a stalwart bulwark around her. But now she was alone, away from her kin for the first time in her life. She was not frightened, for she never met a man she did not make ten of, and she had her blades with her. The world was not as big as she had thought it was. It was simply lonelier.
Of course, she had not come away from Harry to embrace the world, nor even the road to Aberdeen. She had left her man to come home and to find within herself if she had the strength to leave it, to discover whether or not she could live among the English for the rest of her life.
The Lowlanders were little help, for they seemed to her simply English with a different accent. But when she reached Aberdeen and the edge of the Highlands, she began to relax a little and remember why she had come.
She found one of her cousins in the farmers’ market, as she knew she would. There was never a day in summer when one or another of her kin wasn’t in town, save perhaps on Sunday. Michael McElraes, one of her favorite cousins, was waiting there almost as if she had sent for him.
“For God’s sake, Mary Elizabeth Waters. What took it into your head to travel without one of your brothers? Even Davy will have my ballocks for this, and he’s the mildest of the lot.”
“Michael, calm yourself,” Mary said as she hoisted herself into his wagon. The last of her cousin’s summer wool was sold at market, and he was heading back to Glenstock, which was only one loch away from Glenderrin. “I’ll defend you to Davy,” she said. “It’s my harebrained scheme that brought me here. You’re simply rescuing me from myself.”
He groused and clucked to his mules, who knew the way home blindfolded and were happy to go there. Michael’s little son, Bran, was too small to be missed on the farm, so he had been allowed to come along to town. He peeped at her from the back of the wagon, where he had set up a fort of burlap and oilskin hides against the English.
“Good luck to him,” Michael said.
“It’ll hold as well as anything does when the English march their Hessians in and lay waste to the countryside.”
“Aye,” Michael replied. “I need to remind him that oilskin burns hot and fast.”
Mary Elizabeth laughed at that, but she felt a hollow place in her chest. Where once nothing had lived but her hope for good fishing and her freedom for a clean hunt, now in her heart lived Harry’s image. With him gone from her and she from him, the memory of his strawberry-blond hair and sky-blue eyes made her sad.
“You’ve run from a man, then,” Michael said, looking out over the open road, which was dry enough this time of year.
“Who said so?” Mary Elizabeth wondered if her mother had sent a bird and if the whole clan was searching for her already. Michael did not seem particularly alarmed, but was as calm as the McElraeses of Glenstock always were.
“No one had to tell me, lass. You’ve that hunted-rabbit look about you. It’s the same look I wore when I met my Mags. Nigh on ten years ago that was. She got me in her grip, and I settled in fine and proper. But it was a fight there at the end.”
“You fought her?” Mary Elizabeth asked.
“Aye.” Michael McElraes took a bit of dried mutton from his shirt pocket and chewed it, after offering it to her. He handed a bit of it to his son in the back, and little Bran fell to without a word.
“She won,” Mary Elizabeth said.
Michael smiled then, and Mary Elizabeth could not remember ever seeing such a soft light come into her cousin’s eyes. Of course, he was older than she, and she saw him and his only once a year at the Gathering ever since Mother had dragged her out of the bracken and trained her up for a lady. But she knew him well enough to recognize sincerity when she saw it. The McElraeses might cut you where you stand, but they would be honest about it.
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“She did not win, lass. I did.”
Mary Elizabeth digested that bit of information, while the soft smile lingered on Michael’s face. Bran made some commotion in the back then, and his father called to him to settle down before he spooked the mules or fell out of the wagon. Mary Elizabeth went to sit with the boy and help him shore up his defenses, but all the while she thought of Harry, and wondered who had won between them. As far as she could tell, they had both lost.
When Michael came to the gates of Glenderrin, Mary Elizabeth had him drop her and her bag at the old gatehouse. The walls had long since crumbled, brought down by some marauding English almost a century ago. Now the English kept their armies home and sent the taxmen in their place. There were no walls to build against the taxman, so the walls stayed down.
Her brother Ian said that was why the clan had turned wily and kept so much money out of the empire altogether. The Dutch were good bankers and kept clean accounts, but while the family was rebuilding, a great many of them had gone across the sea. The Waterses had found some of their lost cousins and had cobbled together a bit of a clan in Nova Scotia and elsewhere, but the damage the English had done to the Highlands still lingered. And Mary Elizabeth was thinking to marry one of them.
She stood at the gate to her father’s lands and took in the sweet smell of heather on the air. The cool, clean air of the mountains wafted down to her from a great distance, but she felt as if she were standing in heaven. She set aside her pain—the pain of today and the pain to come—and took in the scent of her home. She did not have long to contemplate it, for at her father’s house, one was never alone for long.
Jamie, the gatekeeper’s son, took her bag up to the castle. It held her most prized possessions: her fishing lures and her knives. She had left her sword tucked in Alex’s room, as Fireheart was too unwieldy to carry on the road.
How to Train Your Highlander Page 21