All Scot and Bothered

by Kerrigan Byrne

  His daughter adored Cecelia already because she’d taken the girl in and shown her the love any motherless child would yearn for. She’d have made certain Phoebe’s dream of being a doctor was realized.

  Cecelia. Who’d shown him to the gates of heaven, and then, with a few words, plunged him back into the cold depths of his own desolate hell.

  After he bathed, Ramsay climbed to his hunting perch. From his vantage in the old oak, he watched as Cecelia took Phoebe inside. He followed their candlelight through the windows as the stars came out, knowing their routine by now. They ate their collected berries with clotted cream for dessert, then washed, cleaned teeth, braided hair, told stories.

  And he sat outside as he always did. Apart.

  Alone.

  This time by choice, because life had taught him many things about conquering and survival but blessed little about connection.

  Longing stole his breath as it banded around his chest. It fought with another emotion welling from within. He wished he wasn’t possessed of the acumen to identify it for what it was.

  Fear.

  What he feared most he could not say. Love? Loss? Humiliation and abandonment?

  How sentiment might weaken him. Might render him vulnerable.

  Eventually the night drove him from his watchtower, and he strode toward the woodshed. It was too late to reveal anything to Phoebe now, and he was too weary in every possible way.

  She’d seemed ready enough to accept him as a father figure when he’d spoken to her earlier, but only inasmuch as he would make Cecelia happy.

  And now that he couldn’t, would she be disappointed to call him Papa?

  As he passed the house, Ramsay smelled the sweet pipe tobacco Jean-Yves was fond of smoking on the porch. He quickened his pace, hoping the old man would let him pass in peace.

  No such luck.

  “Fancy a smoke, my lord?” Jean-Yves held up a long pipe in greeting and offering.

  “I doona smoke,” he answered shortly, nodding his head in respect for the elder.

  “If anyone should ask, neither do I,” the Frenchman said with a shrug. “Cecelia doesn’t like it. She worries for my lungs. But she is putting young Phoebe to bed, and what she does not know, she cannot worry about.” Bushy brows waggled in the flaring light of a match as he lit a coal in his pipe.

  Ramsay couldn’t say why he drifted to the dilapidated porch when all he wanted to do was retreat.

  “Here.” Jean-Yves handed him a bottle of caramel liquid. “The whiskey is shit, but it does the trick.”

  “The whiskey was meant to be used medicinally, not recreationally,” Ramsay muttered, taking the glass. “I didna buy it for the label.”

  “If ever there was a medicinal use, this would be it,” Jean-Yves chuffed. “When I found out I was going to be a father, I drank an entire bottle of wine in one hour. But my liver was younger then.”

  Ramsay couldn’t say the idea didn’t appeal to him, but he didn’t want to dull his senses, not when he had two precious women to protect. To be respectful, he brought the bottle to his lips and took a judicious sip, wincing as the liquid hit the back of his throat like fire and acid.

  The Frenchman was right. It was shit.

  Still, he took a second drink.

  He and Jean-Yves watched the nearly full moon crawl across the night sky for a long, silent moment before the elder man spoke in soft tones. “I remember when my daughter was your Phoebe’s age. It is a time of questions and patience and many, many different colors of ribbons.”

  “My Phoebe,” Ramsay murmured, his heart doing an extra thump. He loved her already. He’d fallen for her brilliant crooked smile and dimpled charm before he’d even known of their relation. He wanted to teach her more than how to swim; he wanted to teach her how to fight, how to learn, how to be Scottish.

  He would protect her. Raise her. Spoil and scold her. He would love her more than a child had ever been loved. She would belong, and live every day knowing she was wanted. She would not only be a doctor, but the best doctor. He would fight any school that wouldn’t take her. He would buck any system that wouldn’t allow her to achieve the dreams of keeping mothers alive. He’d help her break down the walls erected by men around institutions and businesses and women, themselves.

  He’d make it so she’d never have to yield.

  Christ, he’d been such an ass. So incredibly blind.

  After all of the grief he’d heaped upon Cecelia’s head since they’d met, he was the one with a hidden scandal.

  He’d been so blinded by anger, by his own inflexible biases, he may have forever lost the one woman he truly wanted. Because he lacked courage.

  While he grappled with his thoughts, his shame, Jean-Yves continued, “I lost my beloved daughter to influenza when she was but a couple of years older than Phoebe. My wife seemed to be fighting off the disease at first, but the grief stole her, too, and I was left alone so young. Younger than you.”

  “I—I’m sorry.” It was what one said, and yet it felt insufficient. Ramsay’s chest hollowed out at the thought, and he’d only known of his progeny for a matter of hours. He couldn’t imagine the loss after raising a beloved daughter from infancy.

  Jean-Yves leaned forward, staring at him intently. “I need to ask you if you plan to take her from us.”

  “What?” Ramsay stared into the stark expression of the wizened man. Not for the first time, he wondered just what exactly was the relationship between Cecelia and the Frenchman. What had forged such a strong bond?

  Jean-Yves glanced out into the night, adjusted his shoulder sling, and suddenly looked very, very tired as he answered the question Ramsay never asked.

  “Just as petite Phoebe is your responsibility now, so is Cecelia mine. She gave me this gift of her little broken heart when she was a girl at Lake Geneva, and I have done my best to guard it as her father should have for many years.” He blinked back to Ramsay, his eyes hard and serious. “You have hurt her, but she will recover from your loss,” the man said bluntly. “But if you plan to rip that child from her arms, I must prepare myself for her grief.”

  “I’m not a monster, of course I wouldna deny them their attachment to each other.” Ramsay took a sip, retreating from the man behind the bottle before he confessed, “The ludicrous irony of this situation is—if Cecelia would have consented to be my wife—I would have ended up raising Phoebe, regardless of what the codex revealed. My own daughter.” He looked into his terrible whiskey and saw only bleak darkness. “I’ve buggered everything.”

  “Yes, Cecelia told me she refused you.” Jean-Yves gave a rather caustic harrumph and took a long drag from his pipe. “She soaked my good shoulder with her tears.”

  She’d wept over him? Ramsay hated that he’d caused her tears.

  “Ye are a good father to her, Monsieur Renault.”

  The man’s teeth clicked on his pipe as his jaw tightened. “Someone needed to be.”

  “Aye,” Ramsay said carefully. “I’ve heard the Vicar Teague was an uncompromising man.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Ramsay waited for the man to elucidate, but he didn’t. Unwilling to pry, he put his hand over his chest, rubbing at the ache that landed there at the very thought of her loss.

  It was where she belonged. In his heart … She was lodged there among the mire of things that caused him pain.

  And joy.

  “Ye approve of her refusal, no doubt.” He leaned over to accept a little more whiskey.

  “Au contraire,” Jean-Yves said vehemently. “I was hoping you’d tame her a little bit. Or at least take over the responsibility of her protection from me. I worry for her when I am gone. Alexandra has her duke, and Francesca her revenge. Cecelia has always been a bit lost, I think. A bit lonely and aimless. Now she has this venture and with it comes danger. I wondered if you might be the answer…” He sighed, letting his sentence trail away. “Anyway, I am getting too old to keep up with these Red Rogues anymore
. And they refuse to slow down.” He put his hands to an aching back, though his complaint was softened by a fondness so tender it might have been called love.

  “I tried,” Ramsay murmured. “She will not be tamed.”

  “You failed.” A meaningful nod of Jean-Yves’s head precipitated a puff of smoke in his direction. “You failed because you do not like women.”

  When Ramsay would have spoken, Jean-Yves put up a hand and made a very Frankian noise of disgust and condescension. “I’m certain you think you have many good reasons, but none of them apply to Cecelia. She has more honor than any soldier. More compassion than any saint. And she is the perfect balance of softness and strength. You are not worthy of her, and I mean that as no slight because none of us are. I know she is not without flaws, but you made her feel unworthy of you, and that is where you lost my support, mon ami.”

  It’d been years, perhaps decades, since anyone dared to give Ramsay such a dressing-down. He felt a defensive ire well within him, but he fed it no heat.

  Because the old man was absolutely correct. It was he who was unworthy of Cecelia’s fathomless well of love. Granted, he couldn’t think of a man alive who would deserve it.

  “I like women just fine. I just … doona trust them,” Ramsay admitted. “I doona trust anyone.”

  “With good reason, I imagine,” Jean-Yves relented.

  “I wanted to trust Cecelia. I like and respect everything about her. I always have, even when I didna want to.”

  “Then why don’t you go in there and tell her so?” Jean-Yves pressed, gesturing expansively toward the door. “Tell her you care not for her plans, but you will bear the brunt of the world for her so she can do what she wants. God knows your shoulders are wide enough to carry some of her burdens, no?”

  “Aye, but I’m not strong enough,” Ramsay said in a voice so low it was nearly carried off by the breeze.

  “To allow her to be herself? To put aside your lofty prejudices to—”

  “I am not strong enough to watch the world despise her.” He cut the old man off as the passionate truth tore out of him.

  “It tears me up inside that someone made attempts on her life. It’s all I can do not to lock her and Phoebe in a tower so no one can hurt them. I doona want to be the husband of a game maker, nay, but more than that, I doona want to live with the fear that every day she spends in that den of vice, she puts herself at risk!”

  He’d expected the proclamation to make him feel weak and vulnerable, but something inside him warmed at the approval he read in the old man’s expression.

  Jean-Yves tipped his glass at Ramsay. “Do you not put yourself at risk on that bench of yours, Lord Chief Justice?”

  “That’s different,” he grunted.

  “Because you are a man?”

  “Aye, goddammit. Because I am a man.” He paced, railing against the unfairness of it all. “Because I have fought for my country and my life, because I can survive what she cannot—I have conquered hells on this earth she couldna even conceive of. And because it is my duty, nay, my privilege to protect those I love.”

  Jean-Yves sat back and regarded him through squinted eyes. “Yes, Lord Ramsay, I believe you have done some very manly things. You have come a long way from here.” He gestured to Elphinstone Croft and the surrounding glade. “I heard some of your troubles and I commend you for your accomplishments. But now you must listen to me.” He struggled to his feet with an ornery grunt, waving off the helping hand Ramsay offered before reaching for the whiskey.

  “For all you’ve revealed to Cecelia, you know very little about her,” Jean-Yves said. “Locking her in a tower would be her personal hell, because she spent so much of her youth locked in a vicar’s cellar.”

  An ache in Ramsay’s belly turned into a stab of pain for her, followed by a whip-burn of anger prickling across his flesh. “What?”

  “When the man she called Father wanted to punish the world, which was often, he punished her, instead. He would lock her in the cellar for days. He would starve her. Beat her. Humiliate her. He would make her feel both small and fat. She would have the indignity and anger of a bitter, impotent man heaped upon her young shoulders. She bore the shame of every woman and every sin starting at Eve and ending with her.

  “So perhaps you were abandoned here, but at least you had water to drink and the sky to look at. You could have run to the city, and you chose not to because you had the will to survive and the means to do so. She had nothing but the darkness and the hatred of a pious man with a dead prick.”

  A wall of emotion pushed Ramsay against the porch post, and it creaked dangerously beneath his weight. “Nay,” he whispered.

  She’d mentioned knowing a bit about loneliness.

  About being unwanted.

  He had no idea she’d such a deep, devastating understanding of it. His fingers curled; he could already feel the throat of the Vicar Teague snapping beneath their strength. “But she was rescued … and sent to Lake Geneva … to you.”

  “Yes. Rescued by Henrietta, apparently, and sent to school at de Chardonne. But do you think her troubles ended there?” Jean-Yves scoffed. “When I met her, she was a plump and friendless little girl alone in the garden I tended. No one would eat with her, because she was nobody to them. They laughed at her for being clever. They laughed because she was round and quiet and shy. And when it is in the nature of many bullied children to become cruel, she cultivated kindness and empathy.”

  The man’s eyes warmed with veneration. “I was nothing but a peasant, yet she took an active interest in my life and my passion for the garden. She befriended me, hungry not just for the food we shared but for any kind word. Any companion, even an ornery, lonely old widower. She dug in the dirt beside me, heedless of her pretty dresses. She made diagrams of my gardens and memorized all the names of my favorite flowers.”

  A tender smile touched Ramsay’s mouth, even as his heart broke for her. Cecelia as a little girl had faced very similar cruelty to what he’d known from other children. A child with no title, no name, but endless expectations to live up to in an institution full of people who thought they were better. She understood him perhaps more than anyone else.

  And he never tried to return the favor.

  Jean-Yves was right. He didn’t deserve her love. No man alive did. And yet she would give it. Endlessly. Because that’s who she was.

  “Did you know that your brother’s duchess killed her rapist?”

  Stunned, Ramsay gaped at the Frenchman, who lifted his hand to smooth back wisps of disappearing hair.

  He and Redmayne had become close. Why hadn’t Piers confided this in him?

  Possibly because of his status as a justice.

  Possibly … because his family didn’t trust him to put them above his principles.

  A new wave of shame threatened to pull him out into the cold.

  “Our Cecelia helped me carry the dead body without hesitation,” Jean-Yves continued. “She put the duchess’s monster in the ground and she toiled next to me with a shovel to bury him.”

  The old man’s eyes glittered a little in the silvery shafts of moonlight, suspicious moisture gathering at the corners. “And then Cecelia took responsibility for that traumatized girl. She bathed her, cared for her, slept beside her, loved her through the aftermath of her terror.

  “Did you know she hired me, and barely allows me to work? Because of her my tragic life has become full of adventure and contentment. She sacrifices everything she is, everything she has, and asks for so little in return. She is kindness personified, even though very few have shown her a modicum of what she is willing to give. And you…”

  The man leaned forward, thrusting an accusing finger toward Ramsay. “You would ask her to forfeit her newfound legacy? To choose between her passion for life and her passion for the man she loves? This world is cruel to women, mon ami, and I thought if anyone had the fortitude to be different, it might be you.”

  “The man she…” Loves? U
nable to say the word, Ramsay looked down at his hands trying to process all he’d learned in the space of a few breaths. He’d known her to be extraordinary but … “I didna ken,” he breathed. “I didna know any of this about her. I thought her sunny disposition and optimistic idealism came from a life of mostly privilege and contentment.”

  “Her brightness has always come from within. She looks into the darkness, and smiles,” Jean-Yves said poetically, his features arranging into an expression of adoration. “She was—she is—like a flower forever starved for rain. If you show her one drop of kindness, of love, she will bloom for you. But what you cannot do, Lord Ramsay, is ask an exotic orchid to be an English rose. Because that woman in there would love you. Would accept you. She would raise your child beside you and lay her life down for you both. But what she will not do is allow you to mold her into something she is not just so you are comfortable. If that is the kind of woman you seek, then you must let her go and find that elsewhere.”

  The truth of it slammed into Ramsay with all the weight of a steam engine.

  Of course. How could he claim the woman only to change what made her captivating? Would he love the parody of herself she would become if she capitulated to his supercilious demands?

  He stalled. That was the second time the word love had snuck into his thoughts.

  Did he … love Cecelia?

  He loved her inability to only eat one truffle or have only one glass of champagne. He loved her voice, her laugh, her wicked wit. He adored every curve and handful of her plump and perfect body, and he even treasured the way she challenged him. Gently, with humor. With a sparkling eye and generous wells of patience and forgiveness.

  Had he reached the bottom of those wells? Had he been too insufferable? Too intolerant? He’d hid loneliness behind rage and cowardice behind hypocrisy.

  He’d have to do so much better. To be better.

  She had principles of her own. Just because they didn’t mirror his, did it mean they were wrong?

  What if she could teach him how to be like her? How to relax and enjoy moments. How to walk the earth as though the devil may care, and how to reclaim regard for others. A regard he’d thought forever lost.